T’Qinna buried her face hard into U’Sumi’s shoulder, while he stroked her hair. A’Nu-Ahki continued to clutch the sides of his mantle.
The bolder wurms scrambled onto their meal, attaching themselves to their thrashing victims with bird-of-prey talons, and ripping them open with scimitar toe claws and striking jaws.
A’Nu-Ahki shouted, “Here is the Basilisk’s plan for all of us! Destroy the children! One way or another; destroy the children! Drag us through the poisoned mud of our own twisted desires, and then laugh as we destroy our own hope for the future!”
Gheri-boy and the other Corsairs glared at him.
Blood-fang barked, “Shut dung-eating mouth, Old Man!”
A’Nu-Ahki ignored him. “It starts in places like Akh’Uzan—where my own ‘wester-man palace’ is! My own people comfortably hold the truth about E’Yahavah with arrogance in their own knowledge! They reduce it to a cultural taboo, or a set of rituals, until the taboos and rituals become the only reality they know. They set standards for their children that they themselves don’t even live up to! Yet they pretend to live up to them and then wonder why their children rebel against them in frustration.”
“Quiet!” Blood-fang shouted. His once-recessed eyes now bulged from his flattened head as if some pressure inside would blast them clear out.
Dragon-breath drawled, “Let’im ramble; ain’t nobody to listen.”
Nevertheless, U’Sumi heard, and it was enough. Understanding suddenly broke through to his afflicted mind: To E’Yahavah it made little difference how people destroyed their children. Those who destroyed them were equally guilty because the end of the progression was equally terrible.
Until now, there had always been a void in U’Sumi’s understanding of World-end. He had either subtly questioned E’Yahavah’s love, or else blindly and boldly accepted the need for a “universal destruction,” with the bigoted assumptions that went with any blindly accepted idea, no matter how correct. Yet now he saw something else—his own attempts to escape from reason and from the pain that reckoning with the truth inevitably brings.
In the leaping, circling basilisks and the trapped shrieking children, U’Sumi saw things for what they were. Humanity’s self-government without E’Yahavah had become a decrepit house about to implode on itself. The cultural, ethical, intellectual, and spiritual foundations of all that kept life sane had eroded so badly that within a few short decades all the world would break down into a giant Desolation of Nhod, to be eventually peopled by the likes of the Qingu or the Corsairs. Both individual dignity and dying communities would finish their slow rot under the ghost-lights of power—mad Watchers lost in their own delusions.
Either that or some super—capable, equally devil-maddened tyrant bent on being the functional god of the world would expand to fill the spiritual vacuum. Everyone would love him in the despairing glow of his lying lights, even as he seized such total control over everything that life would become equally intolerable for all. Advancing technology in the hands of an ambitious few would give this monster ability to locate and crush even the smallest dissent.
If Samyaza’s Assuri, Psydonu’s Aztlan, and a Lumekkor under the shadow of Uggu and Avarnon-Set were each dominions where freedom to walk with E’Yahavah—indeed, any individual freedom whatsoever—was virtually crushed, then what would it be like under a global regime where even these competing forces no longer existed to keep each other in check? What would happen in a world where the Basilisk’s pawns united into one indulgent, all-encompassing, all-consuming empire?
U’Sumi suddenly understood that there was a certain momentum to ideas and events in human history. After a certain point that only E’Yahavah really knew, what was done could not be undone or redirected, only annihilated so that a new process could begin. Only E’Yahavah had the authority, wisdom, and power to demolish and rebuild on such a scale. Kings, sages, and priests often tried to usurp that prerogative, sometimes with the best of intentions, but always to the most ruinous results.
The oracles of truth had been entrusted to U’Sumi’s people—the foundations of family, order, love, life, civilization, and sanity. But the sons of Seti had failed. Whether E’Yahavah shared blame for entrusting such fragile foundations to an incompetent clan of human beings was not U’Sumi’s place to judge, much as part of him wanted badly to do so.
Then it dawned on him.
How could people have any real choice without having some real control over how to build on those foundations—or whether to build on them at all or hide them from future generations? How could the choices of individuals, tribes, and nations have meaning unless E’Yahavah had truly entrusted those foundations to individuals, tribes, and nations? What part of reality was exempt from the workings of cause-and-effect—from responsibility?
It wasn’t E’Yahavah’s haphazard, blind, or heavy-handed oversight at all! It’s us! It’s always been us all along!
The whirlwind of implications unwound into U’Sumi’s mind—like the expanding cause-and-effect of every choice ever made, unraveling with information and energy loss toward chaos and eventual heat-death in the outer void. Except that E’Yahavah had placed limits on human choice and had imposed an even greater underlying order onto things before creating other beings capable of real choice—and thus capable of real good and evil. U’Sumi saw how even Dragon-breath was used unknowingly to speak the very words of E’Yahavah by saying, “Not today, my friend.”
The end of the Great Curse unfolded below them. It also became clear to U’Sumi that just after E’Yahavah had issued that Curse some two thousand years ago, all people had still enjoyed the same access to the foundations of sanity, civilization, and opportunity born of the Promised Seed. However, not everyone had built on those foundations to preserve them for their children. Human selfishness and carelessness had introduced inequities into the system. Equality of opportunity and access to truth at the beginning could never guarantee an equality of end—results.
Not then, and not now.
Any long-term continuity of love, civilization, truth, and moral sanity required U’Sumi to accept that E’Yahavah must have had his reasons for entrusting these oracles in hope to fallen men—and that the Divine Name didn’t owe U’Sumi the son of A’Nu-Ahki any explanations. A man must simply trust the character of his Creator to be good, despite an environment where contrary arguments seemed plausible—even in a world where dragons could shred little children and lick up the blood.
U’Sumi saw with razor clarity the terrible bottom line in that writhing circle of screeching and blood down the hill. E’Yahavah had given to humanity what humanity had first chosen for itself—autonomy from Divine restraint at any cost. The worship of power and pleasure led, either directly or by proxy, to a religion that fed children to wurms as the eventual endgame. Understanding brought no comfort, just an ability to process his horror in the big picture. The nightmares would still haunt him the rest of his life.
A’Nu-Ahki continued to speak over the laughter and the screams, further arming U’Sumi’s thoughts against Shadow-mind’s on-going assault.
“…In Khavilakki, and now Sa-utar, E’Yahavah’s truth is mislabeled as myth and opinion, with empty ceremonies that once had meaning. Priests tell people to follow their own easily warped consciences with mere fables to support them! Religion and morality remain, but with no living relationship to Creator, nor any intellectual foundation. History is suppressed and rewritten. People can only tumble off such an eroding base into the void!”
Shadow-mind suggested to U’Sumi how inappropriate and silly his father sounded philosophizing during the dismem-berment of little children right beneath their eyes.
“Only an impotent fool could do such a thing! If life has any dignity, wouldn’t a respectful silence be much more appropriate?”
The point felt compelling. For a moment, U’Sumi almost agreed.
“…I might be powerless to stop this, but I can still take a stab at how you all see it!” A
’Nu-Ahki blasted away at Shadow-mind with the only weapon left to him.
“Stab away, Yava-man!” Dragon-breath laughed, as he chugged more grain spirits, then belched.
“…At Ayar Adi’In, Lumekkor, and Aztlan, the rot is more obvious. Yet even there some civil limits exist to slow it down! Here, however, all the layers of disguise peel away! The plan of the Basilisk lays exposed! This is where it all leads over generations—the self-indulgent manipulation of religion, politics, and economics in the quest to satisfy bigger and more demanding appetites! It ends here, one way or another—from Atum-Ra’s fall to the mothers feeding these wurms! If E’Yahavah didn’t cut the time short by World-end, the whole earth would eventually get just like this!”
Blood-fang pulled out his side arm and leveled it at A’Nu-Ahki’s head. “You shut face, or I kill you now!”
U’Sumi’s father stared the half-giant down. “Do it! You forget that for something to be worth living for, it must first be worth dying for.”
Dragon-breath said, “Put up the weapon. He ain’t worth losin’ the price of a seer on the slave market over. Here, finish the bag.”
Blood-fang’s decision hung in the air, mingled with the drumbeat. Then he slowly put his weapon away and took the drinking skin again.
U’Sumi let out his breath in a long hiss. The children were dead. The basilisks had settled into their grisly feast. The drums faded into silence, satisfied at another year’s purchase of spiritual protection against hope and reality.
U’Sumi said, “Show’s over; can we go now?”
Dragon-breath opened his mouth to answer, but never spoke.
Loud flashes chattered from the darkness behind him. Dragon-breath fell off his unicorn and became a writhing, screaming mass on the ground.
More hand-cannon fire followed. Blood-fang, Stench, and Gheri-boy tumbled over, as four green-clad figures appeared silently out of the night. One put Dragon-breath out of his misery with a blast to the face.
Yafutu had slid down under Shell-head’s bony collar shield at the sound of the first shot. He hung there by a saddle strap until one of the strangers helped him down to the ground and let him run to A’Nu-Ahki.
A larger party of tricorn-mounted nomads emerged from the darkness on either side of A’Nu-Ahki’s two unicorns. Their leader rode forward, and then unwrapped a turban from around his face.
The face behind the turban belonged to a pale middle-aged man who carried himself with stern and noble bearing. U’Sumi saw nothing surprising in him. What astounded him were his father’s words when the fellow’s turban dropped.
“I’ve seen you before.”
“And I you,” the man said in a thick Iya’Baalim accent.
“At my wedding,” A’Nu-Ahki said. “You were with the bride’s party, representing the house of her half-brother, Iya’Baalu.”
The nomad nodded in full recognition. “That would make you A’Nu-Ahki, of the Seer Clan from Akh’Uzan, for the only half-sister of my ancestor—indeed the only sibling of my ancestor who could still be alive—would be Na’Amiha, the sister of Tubaal-qayin the Great. She and I played together as children, when we both sat under the tutelage of old Mother Udaha. I am Sengrist, Chieftain of Iya’Baalu.”
“Many thanks, kinsman, for rescuing me and my children from these desert wurms.” A’Nu-Ahki bowed and then presented the young people to the nomad chieftain. Yafutu beamed when presented as a son, with no mention made of his adopted status.
Sengrist said, “We’re camped in the foothills about a day’s ride northwest of here, near the hidden passes. There’s a fresh water supply running down from the mountains, and provision—though it looks as if this gear belongs to you, not these Corsairs.”
“True; and thanks for your hospitality. We seek the hidden passes. I wish to return home to my wife, your kinswoman, whom I dearly miss.”
This was the first time U’Sumi had heard his father express that he missed Mother at all, much less “dearly missed” her. The strain between his parents over the incident with Tarbet had clouded their departure for the war, which had troubled U’Sumi far more than he had realized until now. His relief at hearing “dearly miss” somehow eclipsed even their sudden rescue.
The Nomad smiled. “I’m glad you two are happy, and that it did not turn out to be a mere political marriage.”
A’Nu-Ahki put his hand on U’Sumi’s shoulder. “Me too.”
“Is this the son of her flesh?” Sengrist asked, gazing at U’Sumi.
“I am,” U’Sumi answered for himself.
“A fine warrior he looks.”
“He has been tested well in the flames of battle,” A’Nu-Ahki said, without much spirit.
“The war in the west?”
“Yes.”
“How come you so far to the east then?”
A’Nu-Ahki’s tired smile never touched his eyes. “That, my friend, is a long story, better told in the comfort of camp and hearth, than in this place of slaughter.”
Sengrist agreed. He ordered his guards to remount.
The Iya’Baalim had been on patrol ever since Corsair slavers raided their camp several weeks before. Sengrist’s men had overtaken the Corsairs a night earlier, on the scrub-lands to the southeast. The Slavers had been marching their captives to Corsair Haven, the pirate city on the enormous estuary dividing the Desolation of Nhod from the southern jungles. After leaving his main war party to escort the freed captives, Sengrist had taken his patrols ahead to ensure against any ambush of the larger group. Confident now of a clear path, they had been heading home when they found A’Nu-Ahki’s party.
They traveled through much of the night, winding over barren hilly paths, before taking a six hour rest a few hours before dawn. They arrived at Sengrist’s permanent camp about three hours after noon the following day.
U’Sumi immediately noticed the stark differences between the Iya’Baalim settlement and that of Sarvin Angrost on the Desolation’s opposite side. This camp had its own fresh water supply, a clean brook that tumbled out of the mountains and pooled behind a crude stone dam. Though vegetation was still sparse, Sengrist’s valley had several olive and pomegranate trees, something Angrost lacked.
Both settlements made use of spotted tribal labor, though in this similarity there was also a huge difference. Sengrist’s workers all seemed happy and well-fed compared to Angrost’s workforce of living skeletons. This made a great first impression—Sengrist grew up with Mahm, after all.
Like many first impressions, however, it did not take U’Sumi long to discover that it was completely and hopelessly wrong.
I
t began the following day like a creeping background noise you couldn’t even be sure you really heard, a vague ringing in the ears from too much sun or a shadowy motion seen only in the corner of the eye, which vanished whenever you looked at it straight on. U’Sumi’s unease started during his tour of the Iya’Baalim camp and only got stronger as the day wore on—even after he and T’Qinna sat down together to dangle their feet in the cool clear water of the dam’s pool late in the afternoon. Yafutu had stayed with A’Nu-Ahki, who kept close to Sengrist.
Things should have been near perfect.
Instead, T’Qinna seemed tense and distracted, even after she had successfully nursed Taanyx out of her drugged slumber enough to take some fish and water, both from the pool. He was not bothered by her lack of interest in finally being alone with “U’Sumi the Great” after so many weeks of captivity. His anxiety could hardly have been any less unnerving for her—assuming she noticed it, which, knowing her, she did.
They had a couple hours before they had to attend a big evening feast, which Sengrist had called in A’Nu-Ahki’s honor. U’Sumi could see the spotted workers making ready for it over by the main tents. Other such servants seemed unoccupied, except for a few who indolently picked pomegranates. Many spotted tribesmen—mostly women, but a few young men—drifted past the poolside, chattering and laughing. Children also ran about, playing
in large numbers. This should be relaxing.
“You feeling okay?” he asked T’Qinna.
“Well enough, I suppose. Thanks.” But she didn’t look well.
U’Sumi tried to figure out what he was missing for at least another half hour, but got nowhere.
Finally, he blurted out, “Something is wrong here.”
T’Qinna looked at him as if she had been thinking the same thing. “You’ve noticed it too—all the workers and very little work.”
“There’s that. Have you noticed anything else?”
“Your father has said nothing of his mission, which is strange.”
“He’s not told everyone. He refused to tell the keepers at the Gates of the Setting Sun. In many towns—even in Aztlan—he would feel an odd direction to leave people to their own devices about World-end.”
She seemed distressed at the memory. “Surely he wouldn’t do that to his wife’s own kinsmen; especially after they rescued us?”
“I’m only saying that he doesn’t speak of it to absolutely everyone and it doesn’t always seem based on how friendly or hostile they appear. I think it’s a safe bet that he’s not just being disobedient to his calling or lazy.”
T’Qinna gazed into the pool. “It would be silly to think that. It’s not so much your father, it’s these people. I’ve noticed there are far fewer Iya’Baalim than Nhoddic servants.”
“I haven’t seen any taskmasters.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “There are far more effective tools for enslavement than whips—believe me.”
“I do. It’s just the servants seem happy and even appear to have an unusual amount of leisure time.”
T’Qinna’s eyes narrowed. “Where are the old ones?”
“What?”
“The old ones! The ancients, the infirm—I’ve seen them among the Iya’Baalim, and there are far fewer of them than their Nhoddic servants. And have you noticed that none of the servants are too skinny or too fat? None of them even has so much as a long nose or a weak chin!”
The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) Page 29