The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

  Another jolt of manmade thunder rocked the ship.

  A’Nu-Ahki stirred in his sleep.

  The Sailor asked, “Ye know how to play the lots?”

  “No, but I can learn.”

  They never got the chance.

  Another kind of thunder rocked the ship, tossing both men and everything unsecured to the bulkheads onto the deck. It sounded like an explosion inside a thick metal box somewhere nearby. A series of clanks, pops, and hisses followed in a watery metallic echo.

  “We been hit!”

  The ironclad’s main cannons erupted again.

  Another boxed-in explosion jerked the deck, farther away. Then another, and another—all before the ironclad could fire its next volley.

  “You see? It’s begun.”

  U’Sumi said, “Is it getting hot in here?”

  The Sailor rushed into A’Nu-Ahki’s cell and felt the bulkhead, only to pull his hand away with a yelp. “There’s fire in the next compartment!”

  U’Sumi touched the forward wall, opposite the hatch. It too was hot. “There’s one on this side too!”

  Another round from the monitor screamed in right beneath them. The deck warped up, deformed mayhem, throwing U’Sumi and the Sailor into the overhead and down again onto a jagged floor-scape of bowed and ruptured steel. Steam and flame hissed through fissures in the deck seams where the rivets gave way. U’Sumi wove across the compartment to the watertight door and deactivated the seal. He pushed on the door, but it would not budge from its aperture.

  Uninjured, the Sailor lifted A’Nu-Ahki to his shoulders and hopped through the obstacle course to join U’Sumi.

  “I think the metal hatch coaming’s warped!” U’Sumi said.

  “Let’s try it together!”

  The Sailor laid A’Nu-Ahki over an upturned table to shield him from the deck’s heat.

  The compartment quickly became an oven. They heaved against the hatch repeatedly, but it would not budge. Lungs burning, and hands starting to blister on the hot metal, U’Sumi nearly dropped. He did not expect the door to fly open on their final push.

  Both men grabbed A’Nu-Ahki and fell out into the smoky corridor.

  A fire-fighting team already had a hose aimed into the next compartment. The Master Guard shouted to U’Sumi that they should get up into the citadel in case the shot had holed the ironclad below the waterline.

  He grappled A’Nu-Ahki’s unconscious body on one side, while U’Sumi took the other, and led them past the fire fighters to the amidships ladder well. There, through another watertight hatch, a spiral metal stair climbed a vertical shaft into the citadel’s interior.

  The Sailor paused inside and lowered A’Nu-Ahki to the steps.

  This forced U’Sumi to do the same on his side. “What are you doing?” he said, when the Guard knelt down to face the bulkhead.

  U’Sumi stepped around the Sailor, who faced a niche in the bulkhead. It contained a tiny shrine with a bizarre jade and bronze idol of a seven-headed long-necked leviathan clamped inside.

  “We don’t have time for that!”

  “Only a moment to appease the goddess of our ship,” the Sailor said, who mumbled his quick litany before hoisting U’Sumi’s father again.

  They pulled A’Nu-Ahki up several decks until they reached a roofed platform with large open-air windows on either side of the ship. U’Sumi noticed the rocking much more up here, though the open air prevented his earlier motion sickness.

  The Sailor said, “Looks like you get to see after all! This is mess deck. Good view, port and starboard, but not so protected.”

  They laid A’Nu-Ahki against the forward bulkhead and went over to the starboard side to try to spot the enemy ship. U’Sumi leaned his head out the big rectangular window and caught sight of the smaller vessel steaming toward them from ahead and to the right.

  The monitor looked nothing like the ironclad—fast, sleek, narrow, with a low freeboard and profile. Its water screws were completely submerged. Two main forward and three aft turrets, much smaller than the ironclad’s, with double cannons, spat missiles almost continually, every ten to fifteen seconds. More than a minute passed between those from the bigger ship. The monitor did not appear to have suffered any hits as it zigzagged to avoid giving the ironclad’s artillery engines an easy targeting solution.

  Only now did it occur to U’Sumi that he had no idea whether or not he wanted this attacking vessel to win or lose the engagement. Even if it disabled the ironclad, the latter’s crew complement would outnumber that of the monitor at least four to one, making it a boarding party’s nightmare. Yet presumably, a Lumekkorim ship would liberate any prisoners of war found aboard a captured enemy vessel. Would they try to capture it, or simply be satisfied to leave it dead in the water?

  Could they sink a disabled ironclad with focused fire at close range, or use self-propelled mines—maybe the “sea-vipers” the Sailor had mentioned? U’Sumi didn’t know. The smaller missiles of the Lumekkorim ship repeatedly found their mark, knocking out much of the Consortium vessel’s secondary and tertiary cannonade along the starboard side, before the monitor even got into range of these lighter weapons. Smoke and flames billowed from a multitude of holes in the ironclad, though she maintained an even keel. Still the monitor sped at them, unscathed.

  Another thunderclap echoed across the deck. Fire and smoke blasted some two hundred cubits from the muzzles of the forward main turret. For a moment, it obscured the enemy vessel, until the ironclad pushed through its own fallout. A whizzing sound faded away from the great ship.

  After what seemed an impossibly long time, columns of water erupted in slow-motion spouts on either side of the monitor. Then, in the center, came one massive silent explosion. The Lumekkorim vessel flew up out of the sea, snapped in half like a toy. Bow and stern slid beneath the placid waters in seconds, leaving only a green slick of glakka oil and flotsam to testify that there had ever been a vessel there at all. By the time the sound of the explosion reached U’Sumi, the monitor had completely vanished.

  The Sailor let out a war hoop and shouted, “Praise Lady Tiamatu; musta hit de magazines!”

  The ironclad came about on a new heading, toward the wreckage. All serious hope of rescuing any survivors died however, when the cruel song of Tiamatu again dominated the music of the sea, now that the thunder of man fell silent.

  A’

  Nu-Ahki’s fever broke the day after the naval engagement off Monitor Point. For the rest of the voyage his constitution steadily improved.

  U’Sumi filled him in on events since their captivity, except for his vision of World-end, his encounter with Leviathan, and the suicidal sailor. He did not know why he left these out, just that somehow he did not want his father to know about them yet. Father and son grieved quietly for lost family, but A’Nu-Ahki would not allow a full lamentation to take hold. Instead, he explained the importance of focusing on their task.

  U’Sumi said, “What task?”

  This conversation happened the same day the battered ironclad rounded a rocky point on their port side and veered from its northerly heading, half-westward. For days now, the sun had never completely set. Summer shined on the arctic regions, as a pleasant cool breeze rippled the gentle Polar Ocean.

  “Don’t you see?” his father said. “We’ve been given a tremendous opportunity. E’Yahavah has made me his mouthpiece to this generation, to testify in his power to the gods and titans of Earth.”

  “Perhaps so, but we’re prisoners!”

  “Prisoners who have been asked for by name; don’t you see how frightened they are of us? Why go to such trouble on our account?”

  Then it dawned on U’Sumi. From the soldiers who had captured him inside the Elyo’s machine to the taskmasters of the death march to the ship’s jailer and its captain—all had eventually shown them unusual deference. Their consideration had not seemed to stem only from special orders, but from an almost instinctive sense of fear—that was the only fitting word for it! As
for the orders, they revealed how that terror stretched even up to the highest echelons of Consortium leadership.

  A’Nu-Ahki clasped his son by the shoulder and laughed. “Don’t you understand what’s been happening?”

  “Not really.”

  “Avarnon-Set put our regiment out as wurm bait because Uzaaz’El wants us silenced. He couldn’t move against us openly because E’Yahavah shields us and because it would have aroused Seti. The Archonate may hate us, but they can’t easily avoid accusations even from their own supporters of violating Iyared’s Oath. Not that the clans care about us; they just want to be sure that any archonic oaths made to them will still also have meaning. Thus, Avarnon-Set tried to engineer an accident of war.”

  “An accident of war; is that what all this is called?”

  A’Nu-Ahki nodded, as if he had not noticed the bitterness in his son’s tone. “Old Dog-face is afraid because I know the truth about how vulnerable the Watchers really are. He’s even more terrified of their subjugation to the Basilisk, which the Watchers still try to deny even to themselves. Moreover, they fear the power that E’Yahavah has given us over them. Ultimately they can’t touch us and they know it!”

  U’Sumi tried to keep the rawness from his voice. “They touched us hard enough to kill ‘Peti and Pahpo!”

  His father hung his head for a moment, but only for a moment. “Yes, that’s true. I did not mean to imply that they can’t hurt us deeply, only that they can’t defeat us ultimately.”

  “What makes you so sure—if I may be so bold as to ask?”

  “Be bold, Son. Always feel free to ask. It’s just that the little fibers of a larger tapestry are now beginning to connect into a pattern. These Aztlan titans have rebelled against Uzaaz’El because the Watchers who spawned them are trying to overthrow Uzaaz’El’s sway in the West. Meanwhile, Samyaza is taking shape again in the East, gathering his forces for war. But he will be humbled by the outworking of his own delusion…”

  U’Sumi glared at his father. What did Samyaza have to do with anything? Perhaps the old man’s head wound had been worse than first thought; causing him to ramble, and mix old experiences from the Century War with their current situation.

  “Pahp, it’s the titan Psydonu that has us captive. If he’s that afraid of us, it only makes sense that he’ll keep us under his control. More likely he’ll kill us to be rid of the threat, as Uzaaz’El tried.”

  “Yes, Psydonu, quite so; but why does Psydonu care about us?”

  U’Sumi had no answer to that.

  A week later, the ship’s lookout sighted a tall spire on the western horizon. A tower on a promontory of land jutted out from the northernmost coast of the Aztlan subcontinent.

  U’Sumi asked the Captain if that was their destination.

  “Aye, lad. That be Thulae—the Tower at the Top of the World. It’s supposed to sit on the polar axis, but I can tell you secretly that it doesn’t.”

  “How do you know? We’ve been traveling mostly north.”

  The Captain smiled. “The lodestone compass, it points away from the tower at a near twenty-four degree angle. ‘Lodestone North’ is about a week’s ocean voyage out thata-way.” He nodded toward the starboard bow. “Axial North is even beyond that by another couple days. There’s no land there. Don’t tell anyone I told you, though.”

  U’Sumi promised, though he wondered why it should be a big deal.

  The ironclad came to haven at late-night twilight, in the shadows of a bunkered harbor beneath the rocky pinnacle. The tower rose, a black silhouette against the magenta skies, dark lord over a land stained by blood and fire. Both harbor and spire actually sat on an island, connected to the end of the peninsula by a single bridge over a narrow channel. It all looked like one landmass, until U’Sumi saw the western light flickering up from beneath the bridge pylons.

  Once the sailors secured the moorings, the Captain disembarked U’Sumi and his father onto a stone wharf, where a guard squad of towering Cyclopes met and escorted them to a dark chamber beneath the cliffs. The one-eyed ape-men seemed to fear nothing, least of all two chained prisoners. They certainly did not hesitate to shove them around along the way.

  A

  colossal throne rotated slowly on its circular stone dais, giving its occupant a complete panorama of his audience hall. The surrounding fountains showered joyous cascades of fresh spring water over enraptured pilgrims, all kneeling in deep trance-like worship.

  The throne’s occupant gazed over his adoring throng, his mind freely wandering. Their spirit is powerful and funneled through me. The old titans fade. Technology alone was not the answer. I need only the Thickest Root for my tree to grow to shadow the world—and to take nourishment from it…

  His amplified minstrels chanted at their set half-hour interval, “It is not the throne that rotates, but the world that revolves around the throne!”

  The worshipers responded, “Forever and ever our hearts revolve around you, O self-created Psydonu, you who are your own father!”

  The Titan waved and smiled as his pilgrims drifted lazily past. Women fainted or squealed like amorous young piglets in their spiritual ecstasy. Men presented swords ceremonially laced in their own blood. Psydonu returned their salutes and took another sip of his tonic. How easy to bring them happiness! A rush of wholesome satisfaction welled up like the crystal fountains from his deepest heart. Hope is my gift to the multitudes!

  Psydonu leaned back and closed his eyes, while the lulling effect of the powerful opiate washed over his consciousness. He floated in a quiet pool of meditation, a butterfly on a flower adrift in a garden pond.

  Such quietude had become an intense effort, enhanced by the tonic. The dreams troubled him again, more, because of how soon the son of Q’Enukki would arrive. There could be no problem—would be no problem. Women don’t squeal like little piglets at the sight of just any one!

  Treacherous darkness swirled the dissolving elements of corporeal reality into its roaring black vortex. Psydonu found himself again at the maelstrom’s periphery, sinking. The panic grew worse each time.

  A Terrible One sat on a nearby bank, watching the Titan struggle.

  “He’s coming,” the Terrible One said with a terrible smile. “The one who knows the truth about you is coming.”

  The swirling darkness grew, pulling Psydonu into its engulfing pit.

  “I’m waiting for you at the other end.” The Terrible One caressed a great padlock and chain.

  Psydonu howled, as the sickening hot void sucked him in…

  The minstrels sang in deranged harmony, “It is not the throne that rotates, but the world that revolves around the throne!”

  Psydonu opened his eyes; aware that somehow, the Thief had stolen more time from him. Another attack of the Basilisk!

  Curious worshipers clustered at the flower petal ramps outside of the rotating dais. Psydonu composed himself, smiled, and waved again.

  “A vision, my flock!” he declared in his most theatrical seer’s voice.

  Women clasped hands over their hearts, and squealed like excited piglets again. For a split second, Psydonu actually saw jewel-studded snouts on their faces instead of noses. He stifled a belly—laugh.

  The Titan stood, hands stretched to his inquiring knot of devotees. “I saw the spinning void at the center of the Earth! In it were the souls of those who doubt my word! Yet I swam through, unscathed, to the Golden Shore!”

  The minstrels sang, “He swam unscathed to the golden shore!”

  The star-gazers will spend years charting an interpretation for that one. The Giant chuckled to himself. Unfortunately, I don’t have such time.

  He flipped his muscled arms to his followers in a grandiose farewell gesture. “I return now to the deeps of Underworld, to prepare a place of torment for the infidel hordes that fall by my Agents of Judgment!”

  The minstrels echoed, “He returns to Underworld, a place of torment to prepare! Beware! Beware!”

  Psydonu sat on hi
s throne and touched a lever on the sculpted chair arm. The flower petal ramps folded to enclose his seat in a protective bud, as the dais lowered into the floor. He heard the rumble of shooting flames from inside his sinking pod, along with ecstatic cheers from his fading worshipers.

  When the throne bud finished its descent, one of the ramp petals opened to release its passenger. Flickering reds filled the capsule as Psydonu dismounted. Once outside, he smiled with a tremendous sense of well-being. All around him in the hot darkness, like old friends, the tormented faces of Underworld’s damned greeted him with plaintive groans and wails.

  THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367

  Before Him the primeval giants writhe, under the ocean in their prison; the underworld lies open to His eyes.

  —Job 26:5-6a (Moffatt Translation)

  THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367

  8

  Psydonu’s Shield

  U’

  Sumi figured it had been five lightless days since the cyclopeans confined them under the cliff, but with no sense of time, his count could be far off.

  He grumbled in the cell’s wet darkness, “For someone who took such trouble to get us here, Psydonu doesn’t seem in any hurry to see us!”

  “A sign of fear,” his father said. “Psydonu delays the inevitable.”

  “He may not think we’re such a priority now that he has us.”

  “I don’t think so. He wouldn’t have taken all this trouble without an overpowering curiosity and need. If his interest in us had been a whim, he could have more easily sent an inquisitor to Balimar by land rather than divert one of his largest capital ships away from the battle zone, unescorted, just to get us here. He also could have had us taken most of the way by land, which tells me he didn’t want us to be seen passing through any of Aztlan’s cities. The order came by oracle and must have screamed for haste.”

  “Then why wait now? What does he want?”

  A’Nu-Ahki answered, “An oracle; I mean in the old sense of the word—our endorsement maybe? Although the northeastern coast regions of this subcontinent are mostly descended from L’Mekku, the interior and the west coastal zones are red-skinned people like us—from the Middle Colonial Period of Seti’s Archonate. At the latitudinal tropic line south of the Equator, is the megalith built by Q’Enukki on the westernmost shore…”