The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

  Mnemosynae said, “Where?”

  “This way, Mistress.” He led them down to the piers, into an old abandoned wharf house. “If my constables had more manpower and hand-cannons we could put a stop to much of it,” he said along the way. “Last night, one of my men had a hole blown through him the size of my fist.”

  They entered the decaying building.

  Pyra had seen cadavers before—had even dissected one in a recent novitiate study at the Temple lab. What she had never seen was so much blood and the frozen terror on so many glassy-eyed dead faces. About twenty bodies littered the inside of the warehouse, all young girls ranging from Pyra’s age on down to about ten years old. Most had been beaten and strangled after multiple sexual assaults. She felt the gorge rise in her throat, but managed to force it down until she could hardly breathe.

  Mnemosynae asked, “Have your men touched anything?”

  The Constable said, “They left things as they found them this morning, as per your instructions.”

  “Send a runner up to the Temple. Have him tell the guard that I need a priestly service call to collect samples of hair and fluids. If any creation code patterns show up in our past offender records, we can have the Temple Militia take them into custody quickly for re-education. My assistant and I will begin to divine the scene for you.”

  The Constable grunted. “Meaning no disrespect, Mistress, but most of the young men we pick up for this sort of thing have been through Temple re-education before—some repeatedly. Your ability to divine the identities of the offenders is uncanny and much appreciated, but you might want to look again at your re-education program—meaning no offense, Mistress.”

  Mnemosynae seemed irritated by his suggestion, which shocked Pyra almost as much as the Constable’s candor. Could such a thing be true? Pyra had encountered several re-educated people in her work. They had always seemed fully rehabilitated to her. Often they even appeared to have a deeper understanding of their own personal weaknesses and were more apt to be open about their struggles during worship. That’s healthy, isn’t it?

  “It’s an imperfect system, I know,” said the Mistress. “Do you not notify the neighborhood whenever a repeat offender moves in?”

  “Every time. But many sections of the city have at least five or ten repeaters living there, so it does little good. What can the neighborhood families do anyway except keep their children under close guard? I’ve heard of parents who pay huge ransoms to re-educated offenders so they’ll move away. Some of these jokers even make their living resettling each month from street to street and collecting payoffs.”

  “What do you suggest we do to improve, Constable?”

  The Constable shook his head. “Frankly, Mistress, I’m for going back to just hunting them down. Kill them like the carrion wurms they are!”

  Mnemosynae’s violet eyes flared at him. “That would just lower us to their level!”

  “Maybe, but at least a woman might walk to market and back in safety. At least their children could play like—well, children.”

  Pyra had never seen anyone rattle Mnemosynae before—least of all an uncouth constable who probably could barely read, much less have an understanding of human nature that compared with the Mistress of Memory.

  The Constable left them to send off his courier. Pyra watched Mnemosynae pace around the derelict building, as if hearing and seeing the events of the previous night. The Novice didn’t want to interrupt her train of thought, but it was awkward and terrifying to just stand there. How do I learn to divine such a slaughter?

  “It’s really a process of observation and deduction,” Mnemosynae said, as if she had heard Pyra’s silent question.

  “Mistress, I don’t understand what you want me to be doing here. I’ve never seen anything so terrible.”

  Mnemosynae stepped over a body—a girl about Pyra’s age—who resembled a younger version of Khallio’Phe. “I would have preferred to start you with something less intense. There’s really little for us to conclude until the sample—gathering team combs the site.”

  “Can we go outside to wait then?”

  “No, Pyra. We must appear engaged to the constables. It inspires confidence, plus there are details that are easier to observe without a crew of priestly attendants milling about.”

  “Such as?” Pyra could not completely hide her shaking. A cloying evil lingered, a leviathan barely held at bay just beneath the surface of a polluted lake.

  “There were about thirty to forty offenders here, I think.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It would take several boys to control and subdue each female long enough to gather them and keep them here for even a few minutes. Since there are twenty-one bodies, and recent food scraps…”

  Mnemosynae lifted the neck of a broken clay jug. “…I can still smell ale on this vessel. It seems they stocked the site earlier. Perhaps the girls even came willingly—thinking it a harmless youth gathering. It’s possible the offenders lured the victims under such pretenses—which could mean fewer offenders. Either way, there was planning and preparation. I’m sure the Constable is right that they intended to kill the girls afterward.”

  “Why would anyone want to do that? If they had sexual needs they could come to Temple and find priests or priestesses to suit any taste.”

  The Mistress shrugged. “This does not happen every day; not at this scale. This is not about sex, but power and rage. It is unlawful to injure a priestess, unless she initiates and then only in minor stylistic ways leaving no permanent mark. The internal violence of lingering patriarchal ideas corrupts some men to the point where killing is the only thing that gratifies them. It comes out in different ways, some worse than others. You heard how even the Chief Constable was eager to go back to the primitive methods of hunting and killing—it’s the dominant male impulse.”

  “Not all our re-educated sex offenders are men. We of the Temple also kill when necessary.”

  Mnemosynae checked some disturbed dust prints by a side entrance. “Yes, when necessary. That’s the difference between our way and the old ways. The Temple learned that difficult lesson with much pain—before we began the Divine Breeding Program. It was a different time and situation.”

  “How?”

  “At first, when we pacified the Far South Inland Seas City-States, we engineered plagues designed to infect only certain bloodlines of people descended from the warrior-queen Aertemissa. We grew the disease in ampoules, and sprayed the demon strain from aerodrones. Whole villages and even several major cities full of our enemies died within weeks.”

  Pyra’s legs went weak. “How could we ever do such a thing? It’s against everything you’ve taught us!”

  “It was many years ago, darling, and we learned from our mistake. We saw the devastation and grieved over it. The gods punished us for using their gifts to manufacture death. For a time, we had given in to the old patriarchal lust for conquest and we paid a heavy price for it. The plague mutated as it spread, until it began to kill thousands of our own occupation forces before it eventually burned itself out.

  “We discovered then that the more precisely we designed the tiny demons, the more unstable their succeeding generations became with each new infection. The Council decided that we would never again take the easy road with such weapons—it was before I was a full member, dear. We abandoned that path entirely and now use the gifts only to create new life.”

  Pyra tried to force the detached curiosity of a star pupil searching for academic guidance into her voice. “But what about the Divine Breeding Program; are not the Agents of Judgment created to kill?”

  Mnemosynae seemed unperturbed by the question. “They are demigods capable of functions other than warfare. When necessary, they fight, but only in conventional ways, against military targets. They do not spread poison and plague against mothers and children…”

  Pyra shook herself free of the image of her mother’s bloated agony.

  Mnemosynae seemed t
oo wrapped up in her soliloquy to notice. “…We have atoned for our mistakes. That debacle was one of the reasons we broke away from the old masters in the East. The old titans urged us into that war. They encouraged us to breed the plague. They did not want their own hands dirty before the eyes of the world.”

  “Mistress, why have I never learned of these things in my history lessons?” Why tell me now? She wondered.

  “Have you not been taught that progress comes by trial and error?”

  Pyra was now panting. “Yes, but on such a horrendous scale?” The sickly stench of death around her began to make her head spin.

  “We can step outside now—I’ve seen what I need to.” Mnemosynae gathered her protégé in motherly arms and led her from the carnage. “You must forgive the abruptness of all this,” she said, once a fresh sea breeze hit their faces. “I have you on a pace for rapid advancement. It means you need to know certain things the others don’t. I know that must seem disturbing to you right now. I only ask that you be patient and observe. Watch the priests when they arrive. Note their investigative methods.”

  The sea air revived Pyra some, as she gazed out over the harbor, near the drainage tunnel outlet on the beach just to the south. There she saw some old poling boats like the ones her mother used to take her out into the bay on when she was little. The Temple maintained them for both pleasure use and business, to visit deep-draft ships farther out from the quay. Pyra tried to lock onto the memory of those happy childhood outings to avoid the horror inside the rotting warehouse in the rotting city. Unfortunately, the Temple technicians arrived all too soon and returned her to the awful present.

  The rest of the afternoon Pyra followed and observed in a haze. The priestly team deconstructed the warehouse, piece by piece, body by body, like a swarm of ants that ferried the take back up to the Temple laboratories as though it were some hideous ant hill.

  That night Pyra had more nightmares. Her mother lay dead and swollen from beatings on the wharf house floor, except that something huge and hideous exploded from inside her body. Somehow, the Thing wrapped itself around Pyra’s face like a constricting snake with many heads.

  P

  andura was right.

  The condition of Pyra’s mother improved steadily over the next few months. The swelling around her face, neck, and limbs went down considerably, leaving only an enlarged abdomen, where it was expected. Pyra visited almost daily and played the lyre for her. After nearly eight months, she even started to believe that Mauma might pull through this ordeal after all.

  Each week, on her off-cycle, Pyra borrowed a small onager and cart from the Temple livery to take her mother out to the arboretum beyond the eastern city gates. Like the menagerie and the poling boats, this also was a happy place of former childhood outings.

  Streamers of silvery clouds drifted in from the sea. The arboretum sat on a gentle slope overlooking the straits north of Temple City Epymetu. Across the narrows, Pyra saw the shadowy end of that northern subcontinent called Psydonu’s Shield, which stretched to the far Polar Regions where their patron titan ruled from the Earth’s very axial point, in his island city of Thulae. The barren rocky shore opposite contrasted sharply to the richly wooded slopes of the arboretum.

  Pyra reined the onager onto a path that led to her mother’s favorite pool—a resting point for a stream that tumbled down from some higher spring through hanging rhododendrons and tall oak sentinels. She halted the cart on a grassy swath by the tiny pond, where she unhooked the onager to let him graze. Taanyx jumped out the back and ran off to chase squirrels, while Pyra helped her mother down to guide her over to the water.

  Mauma sighed. “Darling, you don’t know what these outings mean to me.” Pyra helped support the weight of her mother’s swollen middle, lowering her onto a mossy stone where her feet could dangle in the pool.

  Pyra sat on the bank next to her. “Soon it will be time, won’t it?”

  “Yes, my T’Qinna. But I feel much better because of you.”

  “You haven’t called me that in years.” Pyra’s eyes began to flood.

  “It is your given name. I use it for special moments. It means ‘beautiful one’ in the Old Dialect.”

  Pyra wiped her eyes and sniffed. “As opposed to ‘the one who burns,’ in the new?”

  “Pyra is also a nice name. Fire can warm as well as burn. The Temple Namer chose well.”

  “I think you chose better.”

  Mauma laughed. “Perhaps you should use them both together.”

  “Pyra T’Qinna or T’Qinna Pyra?”

  “It is the two sides of who you are. You are fiery and beautiful.”

  Pyra moved her foot in the water, which scared a frog up onto the bank. The creature immediately caught her eye—it had three front legs.

  “Mauma, have you noticed that there are more sports in the arboretum than there used to be?”

  “Surely not—they can’t survive well out in the wild.”

  A large salamander climbed onto a nearby rock. It had two heads.

  The creeping dread coiled up Pyra’s spine as she yanked her feet from the water. They had been coming here every week for months. “Each time we visit, I see at least one animal that’s a sport of some kind. We never used to see them here when I was little—only in the Temple gardens.”

  Mauma looked down at the deformed frog. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “Shouldn’t we report it to Pandura?”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing she doesn’t already know.”

  “Mauma, the sports began when a containment mistake was made decades ago in the Temple research—Mnemosynae told me—the same work that led to the Divine Breeding Program. If there are more sports surviving in the wild, it means there are more of them being born than we think.”

  Mauma’s eyes seemed to fade into a forlorn gray. “Maybe you should report this to Pandura, then.”

  T

  he following day did not go well, despite Pyra’s breakthrough with the Lumpy One. Yes, Gorvox had finally engaged in worship, but it was hardly magical. Quite the opposite, he immediately regressed into his shell afterward—something that both puzzled and disturbed the young priestess greatly. She had worked hard for months to get him to feel comfortable around her. Now he seemed more terrified of her than ever.

  Pyra put the Lumpy One out of her mind. She would write it up later and consult ‘Phe. Right now, she had to get into a frame of mind to visit Mauma, and to go see Pandura about the arboretum sports later. She fished out her lyre from under the couch and trudged out of her dorm and across the sundial court. It was hard to work up any cheerfulness today. She had a feeling her smile did not really meet her eyes, but she kept it on anyway until she entered her mother’s domicile at the end of the children’s dorm.

  Pyra knew something was wrong the second she pushed through the doorway hangings. The sickly sweet smell of opium smoke invaded her nostrils. The living space was a mess. She ran down the short hall to her mother’s bedchamber and flew through the flaps.

  Mauma’s divan was empty.

  Harachne sat on the floor with her back propped against the wall. Her opium pipe smoldered in one hand and an empty ale jar sat by her other.

  “She’s gone. They’ve taken her,” the older woman chanted in a deathly singsong.

  Pyra demanded, “When?”

  Harachne peered up at her with glassy eyes. “You can’t follow them, darling. Where they go, no one can follow.”

  Pyra squatted down, burning her gaze into the academy marm’s face. “How long ago did they leave?”

  Harachne grabbed Pyra’s wrist and tried to pull her down. “You’re such a beautiful child. I’m so sad with your mother gone. Stay with me?”

  Pyra wrenched free of the Spider Woman’s grip and smacked her arm away with the lyre in her other hand, smashing the instrument. The discordant twang echoed through the chamber as she rose to her feet. “I’m not ten years old anymore, Harachne. If you touch me again, I will have
you removed from your calling entirely!”

  The older woman laughed softly. “For showing affection? Ah yes, you are Mnemosynae’s new prodigy. You know secrets now don’t you? Tell me, do they comfort you or give you nightmares?”

  Pyra stepped back from her, dropped the collapsed lyre, and brushed through the door flaps.

  “I was a prodigy too, once!” Harachne yelled after her. “One mistake is all it takes to fall from their grace! Then you’ll come back to me! In the end, you will become me!”

  Pyra ran from the dead shell of her childhood, trying to fight down her panic. She’s at the Divine Breeding section of the Temple labs! I don’t have clearance for those spaces! Her legs raced toward Mnemosynae’s Shrine before she even knew what she would do there. Maybe Mnemosynae will help. I just want to see my Mauma one last time; is that so terrible?

  The shrine was empty but open. Mnemosynae hated locks. A luxury she can afford in the protection of the Temple complex, Pyra realized as she entered the sanctum. Beyond the votive altar, the Mistress’ personal quarters lay behind a hanging tapestry. Pyra brushed it aside and entered.

  Clutter filled the tiny suite. Scrolls draped across the reading table, or hung from dusty racks. At the far end of the chamber glowed an oracle orb on a large writing table—Mnemosynae’s gateway to the Temple’s enormous differential calculating engine—which all Council members had. Pyra saw what she needed on the table, basking in the orb’s sickly glow.

  She picked up one of Mnemosynae’s personal access cartouches; an intricately segmented raised polygon set on a medallion. The Mistress was so absent-minded sometimes! Pandura always keeps hers locked away.