Yafutu had tried to comfort her, after she had likewise held him close to console him after she had inexplicably blown up at him. All the while, he kept an eye and an arm on the flying bridge helm wheel, though. He had no hard feelings about her outburst. She’s a girl, after all, and girls have their mystifying fury. They were like the sea itself that way; no sense being offended at the waves, his father would have said.
As the engines roared on, it seemed somehow that T’Qinna’s strength had slowly bled into him, leaving her deserted, trembling, and gibbering with a kind of madness. He poured every bit of that power into Amirdu, though he had no idea what was below them, nor what it drove them to. Then he saw the gap in the jungle off the port bow and the strange orange light inside it, nestled just below the surrounding tree-line.
The Qingu demon-trolls danced and shrieked beneath the glow, Underworld’s tortured damned, while they forced the two larger figures of the Seer-King and U’Sumi to the water’s edge. Yafutu saw the hungry shapes swimming in the foam below them, but even if he hadn’t seen them, it wouldn’t have mattered. Leviathan spawned beneath the Floating Lands.
It took several minutes of speeding toward the Qingu glow-disk for Yafutu to realize that the relentless pounding against the hull had stopped.
“Lady!” he called, “I need you to secure two life-floats to a line to toss to the men when I tell you!”
T’Qinna snapped free of her funk and—bypassing the ladder—vaulted herself over the aft bridge railing to land in a cat-like crouch on the main deck. She tore a couple of floats free of their holders, whipped lines around them, and tied them fast to a cleat between the leviathan-barricades on the port beam.
Yafutu returned his attention to the helm in time to see the ocean heave a monstrous water dome in front of them. It exploded into a mountain of spray and a growing pillar of howling foam.
T
he Qingu’s chant reached inside U’Sumi and grabbed that fear as a caged creature, goading it toward the surface, just as the ravenous monsters he knew even now swam upward beneath them, hidden only by the giant vine mat. Higher and higher boiled the torment, until the shriekers danced around him and somehow even within him, riding his panic upward as a black churning bubble from the bottomless deeps.
The tiny spearmen prodded U’Sumi and his father to the edge of the floating land—where a ribbon of giant vine slalomed out over the deep—a foaming rapacious sea with huge moving shadows just below its surface. Fins broke the waves, sloshing appendages of monsters from the Abyssu that roiled below them like a mass of enormous maggots with spiked teeth.
“Have faith, Son,” his father said, as they stumbled at the brink.
U’Sumi looked at him as if he were a lunatic, and instantly regretted it. He wanted to say something, but knew the air in his lungs would instantly form into a howl of madness if he tried to say anything at all.
In the distance, the tiny silhouette of Amirdu rounded a point and carved the water toward them at full speed. Now that’s a laugh!
A watery explosion like one of the massive projectiles from Aztlan’s great ironclads hit somewhere off to U’Sumi’s right. He looked that direction, but saw only an enormous pillar of foam. Then a growing shadow swept toward him out of the sky, narrowly missing him and his father, to land with a thunderous whump in the clearing behind them.
The living island reared up beneath him and catapulted him into the air out over the sea. U’Sumi gripped his sword like a baby’s security blanket. Even after hitting the water, he mindlessly clutched at the hilt as he sank into the blackness.
Something cold and living brushed against him from beneath, and all he knew was that it wasn’t his father. He made to fend off whatever it was with the sword, but found himself unable to swing, only to jab a little in the direction of the tip.
Then he heard something like laughter out of the deep.
A
horrendous concussion made the sea itself jump beneath the deck; not from something hitting the hull, but transmitted through the water. The largest oceanic dragon Yafutu had ever seen flew up from the pillar of foam. He expected it to turn on his small ship, but it did not. Instead, the great fish-lizard nightmare completely left the water with its head and tail down, as if some vast hammer had struck it right in the heart from below. The beast did a twisting arc toward the clearing where the Qingu danced and wailed.
When the pillar of water fell away, Yafutu saw something even more terrible.
U’
Sumi expected gigantic teeth to impale him at any moment as he dropped through the watery gloom. He opened his stinging eyes, but the surface shown only as a distant shimmer—far too distant. His sword tip pointed upward to catch the growing light. An enormous black shape swam past him, knocking Phoenix Fire from his grip.
He felt something smooth beneath his feet, gently lifting him back toward the surface. The laughter of the deep grew louder, but it was not cold and mocking, rather joyful and hot-blooded.
His lungs ached for air. Then he looked down.
The lifting smoothness beneath him had a huge squinting eye.
Y
afutu watched an enormous bottle-nosed head jab skyward with wild eyes and a smiling jaw studded with triangular teeth. Amirdu, hoary Father of Toothed Whales, and Porpoises, Keeper of the Abyssu where water and fire clashed beneath the world, leaped from the ocean with battle-maddened laughter. Its horizontal tail flukes slammed the sea with a noise even louder than that which had sent Leviathan flying. For even the Queen over the Sons of Pride must flee before the ocean’s Father of Joy—as the old Outrigger hymn said—until the world’s end, when the lands and seas are all changed.
Mortally wounded, Queen Tiamatu landed on top of the Qingu-land, catapulting the Seer King and his son high into the air. They hit the water apart from each other, but no leviathans touched them. Instead, Yafutu saw every Ursunabi-cherished Whale-tooth-sage prophecy unfold before his eyes. Schools of porpoises, the sons and daughters of Amirdu the Wise, circled the splash-points where U’Sumi and his father had hit the waves. He aimed the ship at a zone roughly halfway between those points.
He gave one last look at the shore. The Qingu’s ghost-light had vanished and those demon-trolls not crushed by Leviathan’s death throes threw themselves shrieking into the waves in a suicidal charge. The sea dragons made short work of them before they too cowered into the deeps.
“Prepare to heave the floats!” Yafutu cried to T’Qinna, as he desperately searched for two human heads to breach the troubled dark waters. He did not need to search long.
A’Nu-Ahki, then U’Sumi, both bobbed to the surface, each pulled along by a joyful porpoise. Just like Teel was a happy porpoise. Yafutu wept as he pulled abeam of the survivors and T’Qinna tossed the floats.
A
little over three months after leaving the port below the Gate of the Setting Sun, they sighted true land along the horizon dead ahead.
The coconuts, plus a large haul of water-fruit they had harvested from a small uninhabited floating island about a week after “Amirdu had killed Tiamatu”—as Yafutu insisted had happened—provided just enough drinking water to survive the remainder of the voyage.
A’Nu-Ahki joined U’Sumi in the wheelhouse and gazed at the darkened strip in front of them. “The question is,” he said, “are we looking at Nhod, or the Island of the Corsairs? If the latter, we could be in worse trouble than before. The Gate of the Rising Sun used to be there, twenty-three degrees latitude north of the Equator. Corsairs slaughtered the caretakers there during the Zhri’Nikkor War and took the ruins as their own. They’re much stronger now than they were back then.”
THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367
And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
—Genesis 4:16 (KJV)
THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367
14
Desolation
T
he long ribbon of land�
��real land with bedrock—drew closer.
U’Sumi said, “Too bad we have no charts for the Far East.”
“We don’t need charts,” announced Yafutu, who had scrambled down from the flying bridge holding one of his odd navigation devices. It was a small calculating engine of finely calibrated differential gears, with a lodestone compass and mechanical timepiece. “We’re much farther north than twenty-three degrees latitude. I’ve made a fix on our longitude. We’d’ve hit the Corsair Island days ago if we were that far south.”
“We’d better continue north by northwest along the coast then,” said A’Nu-Ahki. “If my geography serves me, the eastern shores of Outer Nhod run pretty straight into a closed gulf.”
Three days later, they hailed a tiny fishing boat to discover that the small port city of Kai-yin in Coastal Nhod laid only another day’s journey along the seaboard at their current heading. They put into harbor there at dusk on the following day.
D
uring the long voyage, U’Sumi had watched his father comfort Yafutu over the loss of his family, while explaining to him the purpose of what had become their circumnavigation of the globe. U’Sumi had also taught the boy much about history and prophecy, confirming for him that the “Amirdu Incident” was indeed a mighty sign, but not the end of the Cosmic Battle. The boy accepted this seamlessly enough.
Nevertheless, the obvious answer to the question of what now to do with the boat brought about a great deal of hesitation on everyone’s part. The Amirdu had provided the only life Yafutu had ever known. Surely, he was far from finished grieving over his family. His last tie to his parents lay roped to the pier in Kai-yin’s shanty harbor—a poor facility for the repairs it needed.
Sunset fell over the distant mountains that overlooked the seaport. On their second day ashore, Yafutu approached A’Nu-Ahki and U’Sumi, as they rested at the stern after a long day of making what repairs they could on the out-rig nacelle. An earnest look creased his face.
“I want to sell the Amirdu. It’ll price well even as a fixer-upper.”
U’Sumi and A’Nu-Ahki stared at him with amazement.
U’Sumi asked, “Are you sure?”
“Yabo. What else can I do? It’s the end of the world, and even if it wasn’t, my world ended back in that cave. Sailing across the Great Ocean has given me the chance to say goodbye. To see the Mighty Prophecy of Amirdu fulfilled in my lifetime, with my own eyes, is like life from the dead. Everything is changed! I know where my father stowed the deed scroll and all; it’s just that I’ve never done any business stuff before. I need an adult to act as my—what is the word?”
“Trustee,” A’Nu-Ahki said.
“Yabo.”
U’Sumi’s father stood and placed his hand upon Yafutu’s head, as if about to impart a family blessing.
“I will do better than that,” the Seer said. “Yafutu of the Outrigger Fleet-house Ursunabi, I take you to be my adopted son, with all rights and privileges of lineage granted to the Seer Clan. In the eyes of E’Yahavah, and of man, you shall in no way differ from a son of my own blood. This I swear to you and all present by the Divine Name.”
Tears streamed down the boy’s face at this unexpected show of acceptance into the innermost sanctum of family. He threw his arms around A’Nu-Ahki, and stayed there for a long time.
T
he following week, having made what repairs they could to the ship, they began the serious work of unloading and finding a buyer for the Amirdu. T’Qinna and Yafutu stayed at the pier with Taanyx and Shell-head, while U’Sumi and his father set out for the market square.
Kai-yin was squalid and muggy, its single-story mud brick buildings mostly decayed heaps with crumbled facing, missing walls, and dried seaweed laid over sticks for roofing. Many were deserted.
Prostitutes swarmed like flies, without the religious pretext or sanitary conditions of the Temples in Aztlan or Lumekkor. U’Sumi and A’Nu-Ahki could not turn a corner without encountering knots of gaudily dressed women and boys who made frantic obscene gestures at themselves while they clutched at passersby. Their terrorized eyes made U’Sumi wonder if they labored under some unusually cruel form of quota system enforced by hidden taskmasters in the dark rotting buildings.
It seems the world is badly rotted at both edges and its core, he thought, remembering the little naked girl on the earth’s other side, whose brothers doubtless still sold her body. Shadow-mind somehow belched from somewhere far below. U’Sumi ignored it—after the caves beneath the Gates of the Setting Sun and the Qingu, Shadow-mind was almost nothing.
Most of Kai-yin’s prostitutes were mottle-skinned—their faces, bared arms, and midriffs speckled with natural symmetrical patterns similar to those of T’Qinna. Yet there any resemblance ended. Many had misshapen, elongated heads, while others had a conical rounding to the back of the cranium that bulged to a soft point. A few reminded U’Sumi of the odd V-shaped heads of the Qingu, only these were larger and of lighter skin with darker spots. Sand fleas covered all of them equally, as if to make things fair.
The market district contrasted to the rest of the small seaport; its buildings kept in somewhat better repair and its prostitutes a little more knowledgeable of personal hygiene. Some comparatively wealthy merchants held sway here. It was among these that A’Nu-Ahki hoped to find a buyer.
U’Sumi said, “The sooner we can get out of this place, the better! After the Qingu, these people look almost sane, but the name Kai-yin still sounds too much like Qayin the Murderer to be a coincidence.”
“Don’t be so eager. We’ve yet to cross the Desolation of Nhod.”
“It can’t be any worse than this place.”
A’Nu-Ahki glanced at his son with eyes that chided such naiveté. “Don’t bet on it. You’re right about one thing, though. The historians at Sa-utar believe this city may have gotten its name from a corruption of Qayin. Probably the name Qingu is an even more remote distortion of it as well.”
“Old Qayin sure got around.”
His father nodded with a smile. “The falling star, Umara, landed just over those mountains to the west. It contaminated the soil all around here with a poisoned dust few plants can endure. This town survives in some semblance of order only because it draws its sustenance from the sea and trade. Umara made Nhod into one of the few true desert zones on Earth.”
“So E’Yahavah punished Qayin the farmer by cursing the ground for him special—and for everyone after too. This whole place reeks!”
A’Nu-Ahki quickened his pace. “Cause and effect—E’Yahavah forced Qayin to wander, but it often came about by the mechanism of Qayin’s own arrogance. He went north into better lands, where he built the first city. Then his children there overthrew him and cast him back into the crater wastes because of his cruelty to his first wife. That soil today must support far more than one nomad and his tiny coven of concubine daughters. Outcasts and drifters make their home in Nhod, preying off each other with no rule of law. It’s a land where only the scavenging wurm is king.”
W
ith proceeds from the sale of the Amirdu, A’Nu-Ahki and Yafutu bought a second unicorn to carry the array of supplies and dried foodstuffs for the long journey ahead. They also hired a guide to take them across the southern arm of the Kharir Umara, or Mountains of Bitterness, and through the Desolation, west to the Ufratsia range. From there, they planned to cut into Northern Assuri along the hidden passes that only the mottled people and the nomad Iya’Baalim tribes knew.
The buyer of the boat also threw in a few weapons; a rapid-fire rotary hand-cannon with two rolls of “finger clips”—ammunition ringlets of ten rounds apiece—a short broadsword for Yafutu, and a scimitar for A’Nu-Ahki, who had dropped his in the ocean when he was thrown from the Qingu float-island. The Nhoddic Trader assured them of the hardware’s necessity when he discovered they wanted outfitting for a trek inland into Nhod. U’Sumi taught T’Qinna how to shoot more than just arrows after that.
Two weeks after putti
ng ashore at Kai-yin, they set off up the Uqid River valley, which descended from the mountain pass out of the Desolation.
U’Sumi could not say he liked their guide—a scar-faced mottled rogue by the name of Dragon-breath—who mumbled coarsely to himself and often startled them with a hyena-like laugh for no apparent reason. They would have tried the journey without a scout, except that would have forced them to go many weeks farther south, into the gap between Nhod and Ufratsia. That detour would also have taken them through Corsair country.
Dragon-breath knew the location of the hidden mountain trails—the same paths legend said that pack-hunting wurms drove Qayin and his wife along during their wanderings after they left the presence of E’Yahavah. As Dragon-breath was the only one willing to take the job at the price offered, U’Sumi was stuck with him.
“We stay following Uqid Valley up to pass, then over to my uncle’s salt works by Cup of Bitterness,” explained Dragon-breath, two days out from Kai-yin. “Uncle-Sarv put us up and water us. Drink no stream that flows from Umara—bitter she is, the star that fell, bitter she is—rotten lady! Rotten lady that take all you gut, and then leaves you wit yer throat swellin’ shut. Eeeee, she a rotten lady!” He ended with a hyena laugh.
Both T’Qinna and Yafutu looked to U’Sumi with unsure eyes. This hardly went unnoticed by their smiling Guide, who rode alone on the second unicorn next to them, with most of the stores. I should fix our seating when we mount up tomorrow, U’Sumi thought. I need to sit right behind him.
A’Nu-Ahki sat in the forward saddle and remained quiet. The trail soon narrowed, so that Dragon-breath had to pull ahead. From here, until they came down the opposite side of the pass, they needed to go single file. U’Sumi held the hand-cannon on his lap, thankful he had their Guide in front where he could keep an eye on him.
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