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

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Farsa trudged on under Varkun’s soggy arm.

  Moon and Vark are so full of dragon scat! But I guess there’s nothing left for them to hold on to. Farsa had the same sourness as when she had watched Tarbet dance with the Temple transvestites on the village orb. Helpers, Archons—what’s the difference? It all seemed equally asinine.

  The rain had pelted them until their skins welted purple. Still they moved on, eyes to the mud, one leg forward to test footing, step, pause, and be glad the trail still held. No, nothing terrified Farsa more than the thought of dying alone. Varkun provided little security there.

  Maybe I’m just as ridiculous in the end. Farsa had nothing else to do to keep her mind off the cold and pain but to reflect.

  She had never really liked Varkun as a friend. His only appeal had been his power over the others. He was Farsa’s walking trophy. The cold drench and a glance at Varkun’s low forehead, straggly hair, enormous jaws, and stooped posture gave her the quintessential “morning after” revelation. Her “dark prince” from years of off-and-on “late night-befores” was really nothing but a pathetic drifter with too many disgusting habits to count. Then she thought of Sariya’s self-mutilating rebellion against her own womanhood. Neither women nor men can be trusted for love…

  The ground shook. A drowned-out warning came from Avarnon-Set.

  Farsa didn’t see the melon-sized boulder bounce off her shoulder and knock her from Varkun’s half-hearted grip. It threw her off the trail, her feet dangling over a chasm, which drank the softening slopes like honey.

  “Varkun, help me out!” she screamed, clutching the loosening soil.

  The Dragon Worshiper stood above her for a moment, as if calculating the risk of stepping out close enough to the edge to lift her back onto the path. She watched helplessly, while his dull eyes decided not. He gave a shrug, apologized most sincerely, and turned to follow the others.

  Farsa could not believe that anyone, even a dragon worshiper, would just leave her to die by herself!

  She screamed for help, but she and Varkun had been at the back of the line. She felt sure Moon-chaser would have stopped, but he was way up by Avarnon-Set, and probably could not see or hear her.

  Betrayal’s despair grew deep inside her, kicking with Varkun’s unborn child, a product of their tireless sexual experimentation. She had casually given him every weird thing he’d asked for, and he had hungrily taken all, and demanded more. However, the betrayal was not just Varkun’s.

  What had happened to the shining futures promised by the Helpers? The Wisdom Tree, now far below, lay deep under mountain slurries. Perhaps the Helpers were as powerless over these waters as she was! Power over the waters—where are you, Tiva’s E’Yahavah?

  “Let go. I have servants that will catch you.”

  “What?” Farsa said into the rain.

  The Voice somehow surrounded her. “Let go, and trust me. I’m here. Your companions go to a far worse fate.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Trust me. You did what I asked. For you the pain ends.”

  Farsa closed her eyes, and released the ledge. She felt herself fall through running water for only a second, buffeted by shredding stones and crushing boulders. Then the pain stopped.

  When she opened her eyes, the storm was gone. She found herself in the arms of a bearded elder who had just caught her from a cool crystal waterfall in a wooded glade of some warm garden paradise. Instead of a sunny sky, however, the warmth radiated downward from a red-orange miasma of what appeared to be muted liquid fire across a great gulf fixed overhead. Others gathered around her nearby on a sandy bank.

  The Elder embraced her, as her father never had. When he spoke, it puzzled her that his voice was not the one that had guided her in the storm.

  “Welcome, Farsa. My name is Muhet’Usalaq. You are with friends.”

  Probably the most destructive of all waves is that form of tidal wave known as the tsunami. Actually, these are not true tidal waves, although commonly called so, but are caused by submarine earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or slides. They have been known to attain velocities of 400 or more miles per hour and heights of 130 feet and to travel extraordinary distances.

  —John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris

  The Genesis Flood

  9

  Shock Waves

  They left my father out to die!

  Sutara dreaded meal times most of all. At meal times, she had to look at the others, and that made things unbearable.

  Over two weeks had passed since A’Nu-Ahki had locked her father out. Satori’s final shrieks tormented Suta’s dreams, and slapped the face of her every waking moment. All his life, her father had been the picture of dignity himself, and the defender of it in others. He’d had his faults, sure! But to have his self-respect stripped from him in his final moments; to hear him beg and sob through that door like some cowardly petty criminal about to be tormented to death for venial crimes, gnawed at her like an acid of pure hate. Worse, Suta sat at the table with the one who had sentenced him to die.

  How could I have gone along with this for so long—if I had only understood? I’m so stupid! The whole thing just provoked Pahpa from the start! How could it not? Now that Sutara understood, she could only be silent in her revelation of revulsion, trapped on a ship with people blinded by the fanaticism her father had tried so hard to expose. I’m so stupid! I deserved to die out there, not him!

  She discreetly fondled the bauble tied under her skirt, and watched the rest of the family eat through half-closed eyes. Satori had given her the prayer crystal at her mother’s funeral. Sutara had not wanted to accept it, but grief had so crushed him that she didn’t feel right making a fuss.

  She remembered her father’s words over the grave. “I know you don’t believe in it, Suta, but this prayer crystal has been in your mother’s family a long time. Her parents would want you to have it as a keepsake. They say in Khavilakki that it brings peace and focus to their prayers.”

  Sutara had kept the trinket locked away for years. On the night of her father’s death, her anger and grief had drawn her to that little box.

  Suta’s prayers had far more focus now. So did her rage.

  As she glanced sideways into the faces eating around her, their banter only reinforced her painful realization. They’re so blind! They have to be! Who with their right mind could sit around a table, smile, laugh, and tell stories as they do while an entire world drowns outside?

  “Ooh, pass me some more of that bean porridge!” Tiva snorted, unwilling even to wait for the bowl to reach her before she started heaping out spoonfuls of the brown slop onto her platter.

  Khumi’s wife somehow bothered Suta especially. She’s actually glad her parents are outside! Look at her stuff her face like a little piglet! She’s getting downright fat! How can A’Nu-Ahki’s E’Yahavah ransom such a selfish little whore with the blood of my mother, and then slam the door on my Pahpa? That’s it, isn’t it? They traded my mother for that little slut on the same night—bartered with the Basilisk—just so their wayward little boy could keep his bynt! Worse, I was too stupid to see it! Sutara excused herself from the table to re-stoke the hearth. She couldn’t look at them anymore.

  She opened the iron door to the oven with a damp cloth, and shoved in some dried manure. Suta had almost refastened the latch, when the deck reared up and tossed her back into the table in a flurry of burning coals.

  Q’Enukki stared back at himself in the mirror image, and saw grieving eyes that reflected a world in flames. Yet nothing in the face of his future self revealed anything about what he was doing there in the flesh, or why he stood before a pile of smoking bodies.

  The gate-creature’s transit node veered, and broke the link.

  The present World-end of Water filled Q’Enukki’s senses again, as several huge asteroids passed so close to Earth that they carved fiery streaks through the turbulent atmosphere. Their gravity drew magma up under the fast-dissolving land of
Near Kush. Torqueing pressures between the shattered continental plates nearby—where the global fissure crossed the Assuri Ocean subduction line—shifted the severed northeast section of the South Kush Alliance/Fire-drake Jungle plate northward.

  The rotation axis on the massive Lumekkor/Aedenic craton shifted west and south. The erupting branch of the great rift veered to its end in Khavilakki. This lopped off the far west end of the Kush-Assuri-Zhri’Nikkor subduction line, which continued as a separate trench that would dry up into a vast wind-blown desert, below sea level, bottomed out by super-salty lakes during the first few centuries after the Deluge. In a somewhat later tectonic aftershock, the new western ocean would break though to fill this vast series of arid troughs to form the Mediterranean Sea, around the time the first of the scattered tribes of humanity crudely rediscovered the rudiments of writing.

  Q’Enukki’s eyes snapped back to the present, as the great rift in the flooded lowlands of what was once Near Kush started slapping huge tsunami waves through the backed-up Gihunu and Pisunu watersheds.

  The first killer walls of water began to slam inland to what had once been the Valley of Akh’Uzan.

  Nu fell backward into a clatter of pottery and food. A giant earthenware cruse of olive oil jumped its mount, and crashed to the deck amid the rolling stove coals. Creeping streamers of flame ignited across the galley before anyone had time to think.

  The deck dove forward, until Nu felt the armored keels grind into the submerged wharfing platform. Barque of Aeons fought to right itself between its tether chains, which clattered like giant rattlesnakes, their capstan gears zipping to unwind slack to compensate for the wave.

  U’Sumi jumped to the scullery sluice lever, and jerked it open to douse the fires. The running water only lifted the patches of burning oil, and sent them in speedy tendrils further across the deck.

  “Close it down!” Khumi yelled, shoving past his stunned brother to cut off the water flow.

  Nu ripped one of his wife’s wall tapestries down, and beat the flames out around his feet. In the corner of his eye, he saw T’Qinna scream as she shut the oven door with her bare hands to prevent another rain of flaming coals from spilling out. ‘Miha threw herself over the table to escape a river of burning oil that almost ignited her wrap.

  A’Nu-Ahki stumbled when the ship shifted down astern, at the wave’s retreat. His stomach did somersaults at a falling sensation that ended with a screeching lurch. The deck flung them all to the port side of the galley. A wrenching snap echoed from somewhere below, jarring the deck beneath their feet, as Barque of Aeons settled on a steady list to port.

  A’Nu-Ahki barked above the screaming, “U’Sumi, get to the forward shack and give me a status report! ‘Peti, you do the same aft! Khumi, drop the hull pool lid, if it hasn’t dropped itself already! T’Qinna, you’re with me down below to see if we’ve been holed under the water line. The rest of you get these fires out! Move!”

  Another wave struck. It lifted the ship off its keels again, and drew it eastward as far as the aft tether chain allowed. The sudden stop at the tether’s end hurled everybody forward into the nearest bulkhead.

  Nu lifted his head to see heavy smoke billowing from the library.

  Tsulia felt the big wave hit the softened foothills far below, but could see nothing. She sheltered herself under Tarbet’s cloak, and tried to focus on the short strip of pathway ahead of her and the remaining climbers. It cut across a dark, rocky cliff face with a bottomless drop on the left. Forty cubits in front of her, the final tunnel contained a staircase up through the cliff, into the main ziggurat of Floodhaven. The rumble loomed closer from the rear, raging up like an angry leviathan out of the watery gloom.

  Tsuli heard Varkun panic behind her. She turned to see him push through the narrow line for the tunnel.

  “Let me through! I can tell it’s dusk! Twenty-one days! Let me by!”

  Varkun shoved other survivors that did not move quickly enough over into the ravine, adding their death wails to his own wild shrieks. When the crazed Dragon-Priest came abreast of Tsulia and the Archon, he screamed, “I’m gonna make it, I’m gonna beat the curse!”

  Avarnon-Set turned and raised his hand-cannon.

  A split-second burst from the Titan’s weapon, and Varkun’s headless body tumbled off into the chasm. Tsulia and the Archon stood shivering in a bath of his shattered skull fragments.

  Tsulia buried her face in the Archon’s cloak and screamed. She felt Tarbet’s hand smother her mouth protectively to silence her, lest the wolf-headed monstrosity rest his anger on her also.

  The roar from below drew nearer.

  They had almost made it to the top. Howling winds shot horizontal sheet-jets of water off the crest not far above them. The squishy trail behind them sagged, as it crumbled into the chaotic void. Tsulia glanced back and saw the chasm swallow Sariya, and most of the other climbers, in a torrent of mud.

  “Move!” Tarbet roared, as he pulled her with him over the remainder of the path to where Avarnon-Set, Moon-chaser, and a few others had just about reached the tunnel.

  Tsulia and the Archon lunged inside the stone passageway just as the last of the trail fell away. Inside the tunnel, a blessed muffling blocked out the worst of the storm. The roar below subsided, and the tremor stopped. Of the one hundred or so Hollowers that had started the climb from Q’Enukki’s Retreat, fewer than ten now remained, beside Tarbet and Avarnon-Set.

  Tiva rolled under the galley table, shrieked, and slapped her clothes. Hot cinders trapped under her skirt seared her legs until she beat them out. The second wave rolled the deck in a throttle-ride of fire and water, until she froze against a table leg, her breath in shallow pants. Bean porridge caked her face and hair, while tears ran from smoke-stung eyes. She heard the others shouting in the background, as they beat at the flames.

  Tiva wanted to help them, willed herself to move, but could not break free of her hysterical paralysis. Again, her inner tormentor drenched her in steaming wet shame. Yargat’s conditioning still stuck—even after all the years since she had supposedly overcome her brother’s abuse.

  If not consumed by her sense of disgrace, Tiva might have felt another presence with her under the table sooner. By the time she realized it, an iron fist clenched the hair on the back of her head. A body fell on top of her, and another hand grabbed her wrist to complete a wrestler’s hold that pinned Tiva’s face to the deck. She opened her eyes, afraid a river of flame would run into her face. Her attacker knelt between her shoulder blades.

  “Taste the terror outside, whore, and take your brand!” hissed the shrill voice some hate-consumed harpy. The Assailant pressed the back of Tiva’s hand deliberately into a large glowing coal.

  Another wave masked Tiva’s screech. The deck bounced, and bowled her with her tormentor away from the table and the stove.

  Sutara rolled from on top of Tiva, eyes ablaze with a heat more terrifying than the flames.

  The others had rushed to fight the library blaze, leaving the two girls alone in the still smoldering galley. The sway of the ship slowly subsided.

  Tiva sat up and faced Sutara, trembling with a hurt far deeper than her seared hand.

  “Why did you do that?” she cried. “I thought we were friends.”

  The heat in Sutara’s eyes plummeted to some icy ocean depth. She answered in a low, articulate monotone, “How could I be friends with you? You don’t belong on this ship. You’re a useless, self-centered whore.”

  Tiva looked away from the penetration of Sutara’s glare, but the words echoed more forcefully than the pulsing brand on her hand. I thought I had escaped! Oh E’Yahavah, I thought I had escaped! But there is no escape, is there? Yargat’ll never really die, will he?

  Nu attacked the wall of fire inside the library. The seed of mankind’s accumulated knowledge had begun to curl into ash all around him. The brown haze of its lost parchment histories clouded the choking air. He had sent T’Qinna below to inspect the hull alone, while he
fought for his collection. Long conversations with the young sailor, Yafutu Ursunabi, had taught him that fire was more to be dreaded than water at sea.

  “Water!” He gagged from smoke inhalation.

  ‘Miha rushed in from the galley, unraveling the hose, while Iyapeti manned the main pump to fill it from the rain catch tanks. Once she had a stiff tube, she opened the nozzle to a wide spray and dowsed one of the scroll racks. Nu continued to flail at the thinning oil slicks with his tapestry and cloak. All around them the chronicles, art, and literature of an entire civilization sat in danger of crumbling to ash.

  Once the hose came to bear on a fine-spray-setting, however, the blaze quickly settled, and the air cleared. They made rapid headway, until the last piece of burning vellum extinguished. With better visibility, Nu realized that the library devastation could have been much worse.

  It took him a minute to notice that the ship no longer listed, and the waves had stopped. While thankful for the limited library damage, the loss of such priceless manuscripts left him empty. As he caught his breath amid the ashes, a wave of mourning swept over him nearly as deep as what had followed the death of Muhet’Usalaq.

  The fire had shown no discrimination. Though many of the lost works belonged to lesser authors, six original scrolls from Q’Enukki—books of worship, science, and law—were gone forever. A’Nu-Ahki could try to reconstruct them from memory, but they would never be the same.

  He stormed out of the library to find Sutara and Tiva seated, facing each other idly on the mess deck.

  “Don’t just sit there, girls,” Nu said, “get aft, and check on those animals!” He then punched the ship-wide oracle and roared, “Where are those damage estimates?”

  A moment later, U’Sumi leaped down the mezzanine ladder. “The ship’s mooring is off-center, north of the drydock supports. Bow depth is about thirty-two cubits. The forward port side of the drydock structure is sticking above the surface, which means that the assembly collapsed on the other side. We can’t move back into the mooring trough, and the main drogue stone is snagged there under the braces.”