The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

  Tylurnis, relatively unhurt, said, “I’ll go in with you after my Motherin-law!”

  U’Sumi nodded and entered the now-smoking hole.

  Turbid blackness choked them each step of the way. Sheets of flame approached the remains of the command suite in the aft section.

  U’Sumi stepped through the door and down to where Isha’Tahar lay trapped. One shattered console at a time, he tossed the equipment over his shoulder into the onrushing fire. Tylurnis did the same on the other side of the old woman. Smoke nearly as hot as the flames seared his coughing lungs, and by the time they pulled her free, U’Sumi could barely breathe.

  They lifted Isha’Tahar and dragged her through the cabin door. Both stumbled in hacking fits during their trek back down the twisted aisle to the hole, which they could no longer see. Hot grimy air moved against U’Sumi’s skin, funneling toward the outside, pulling them to the opening.

  Finally, they fell out of the hole into the shrubbery, gasping like grounded fish. The wing tank went up, taking the rest of the fuselage with it. The concussion slammed them to the ground as they scrambled away.

  Heads still spinning from lack of air, they dragged the Queen’s body across the clearing toward where A’Nu-Ahki worked on Yafutu. Too weak to make it in one sprint, they rested about half way even though the inferno baked their skin from behind.

  When they released Isha’Tahar onto a bed of ferns, the old woman clasped U’Sumi’s wrist with fingers of steel and pulled him down on top of her. The scorpion eyes returned and her breath reeked up at him of decayed flesh even over the smoke. She cocked her head sideways, opened her mouth wide as some feeding snake, and vomited out a long irregular lump of sticky greenish-brown filth.

  All U’Sumi could think as he watched her was how glad he was that she had turned her head and not fired the stuff up into his face. After she finished retching out the long mass, she loosened her grip on his hand.

  U’Sumi pulled free and scrambled away on his hands and knees, afraid even to take the time to stand lest she grab at his foot. When he reached a safe distance, he turned and pulled himself up against a tree.

  Isha’Tahar lay where he had left her, with a cowering Tylurnis just a few paces off. Over the old woman’s body, aglow with a pale off-white shimmer against the forest shadow, squatted a strange man-like being of a type U’Sumi had never seen before.

  The coldly glowing man-thing examined the ancient Queen almost tenderly, touching her as if to revive her or check for injuries. U’Sumi pressed himself against the tree and watched the creature with a mixture of fascination and dread. It seemed that the very fabric of reality curled and wavered around both it and Isha’Tahar, though this might have been heat from the burning astra so close behind them. Soft horn-like protuberances grew from the glow-man’s large ovoid head vaguely suggestive of the cranial spikes on Samyaza’s sons, but more like tentacles that writhed back and forth to sense something not in the air, but in the currents of something else.

  The creature looked up at U’Sumi with huge black eyes, while the angry cicadas began to scream in his head louder than ever.

  For a fleeting moment, those enormous white-less slits became swirling vortices of eternal hate. Then its visage shifted like a changing mask. The eyes softened into deep pools of wisdom, while its thin under-muscled arms and legs seemed to suggest a benevolence U’Sumi somehow wanted to embrace. Then he noticed where its three-toed feet touched the ground. It crouched by Isha’Tahar’s head in exactly the spot where she had vomited. The sticky greenish bile mess had disappeared entirely.

  The implications of this only became clear when the light flashed above the trees. The glow of the floating disk approached from over the river. U’Sumi backed around the tree and stumbled across the clearing until he stood by his father.

  Tylurnis followed at a slower pace, but moved over by her sister.

  A’Nu-Ahki looked up from Yafutu only when glare from the descending object shone in his face.

  T’Qinna wrapped her arms around U’Sumi. They both, along with the two sisters, stared transfixed by the glowing craft—if craft it could be called. It was no aerodrone or astra made by the hand of man. Indeed, it looked to be alive somehow, pulsing, undulating, as if it breathed and sensed through its liquid-metal skin. U’Sumi wondered how the thing could fly by the normal rules of physical motion.

  Taanyx gave a terrified yowl and bolted into the forest as the disk lowered itself to the ground not a hundred cubits away. It touched down just a bit farther off than Isha’Tahar and her strange creature. Three legs grew from its bottom—not like mechanical landing struts, but as great gelatinous pseudopods that hardened into solid prongs as they met the ground. A seamless door opened on the underside facing the survivors. From it, a phosphorescent liquid ramp emerged like some enormous wet tongue.

  U’Sumi was certain that the door was actually a mouth that led into some huge mollusk-like digestive tract that would slowly eat away any person that went into it with its soaking acid, burning them forever—body and soul—consuming without end. The edges of the opening quivered like expectant silvery lips half-hiding rows of metallic blade teeth, all coated by a glistening poisoned ooze. The tongue-ramp had a perverse beauty to it, like a colorfully marbled living slab of mother-of-pearl meat able to cause men to burn mad with rage and desire. In it, muscle—shapes of writhing women flexed, invited, and teased him to enter. He took a half-step toward it.

  T’Qinna held his arm, and for a blessed second he could see and feel only her. Then U’Sumi realized that the acid of the floating monstrosity’s digestive tract and the glistening poisoned ooze of its undulating lips was somehow just a chemical musk mimicking his own passions, unleashed to burn him down into a shriveled wanton wreck that endlessly craved more and more with an empty heart growing ever less able to enjoy anything. In the end-that-never-ended, existence inside that hungry meat-sack would become a burning, itching, everlastingly bitter acid bath, aflame with exploding desires forever impossible to satisfy.

  Six such shriveled creatures with large bug-like eyes and oversized heads, each soaked in the clinging corrosive resin of their own experimental passions, descended the gangway-tongue, which gave softly under their three-toed feet like raw flesh. Two moved toward the first man-thing and Isha’Tahar, while the others approached A’Nu-Ahki’s group.

  U’Sumi noticed the same otherworldly glow to their skin and clothes, which matched the cold gray-white of the being that hovered over Samyaza’s queen. These creatures were smaller and had no head growths, but the writhing stench of used-up musk curled from their snail-wet bodies like rank filaments of heat-rippled air.

  Strangely enough, young Yafutu first broke the terrified silence. He spoke to A’Nu-Ahki, “My Father, do you see how weak they are when faced by E’Yahavah and their brothers who did not fall?” His soft fading voice became an ocean of tranquility wide and deep enough to cover the jagged breakers of terror engulfing the others. “Even a mortal man, who trusts the Divine Name, is more than they.”

  U’Sumi panted, as the creatures drew nearer. “What do you mean?”

  Then his understanding caught up to his seeing. The glowing gray ones had been reducing in a liquid fire of their own making, stunted and degenerate, just as Yafutu said, just as U’Sumi had surmised.

  Then the internal cicada howl increased, until U’Sumi was sure the bugs had burrowed inside his skull. These withered gray-glow creatures might be shriveled, but terror out of mind writhed before them in reality-warping billows that stretched and pummeled the very air, as if some horrendous beast thrashed behind a thin veil to claw its way through into the visible world.

  T’Qinna screamed, and seemingly could not stop, no matter how tightly U’Sumi held onto her.

  T’

  Qinna had nothing left. She was sure the spindly glow-men would somehow get her; that they would pull her down onto that hideous pulsating tongue-ramp, which then would lift up and slide her downward into eternally devo
uring kisses from that giant reeking mouth!

  Yafutu’s adamant voice somehow rose above her terrible wails and quieted them. The boy was dying. His eyes now opened, he saw things as they really were. He cried out in his agony, “Can’t you see the ones standing by us, all around? Great kherubar I see, with lion bodies and wings of storm that overshadow us, claws of diamond unsheathed for battle, with fiery swords drawn in their hands. With them are the Flaming Ones, warning the little uglies not to step out of line.”

  “He’s right,” A’Nu-Ahki whispered. “I can’t see them, but I know they’re here.”

  T’Qinna found her composure again, ashamed out of mind because she wasn’t normally a screamer. “Who are these creatures, and what do they want?” she asked, trembling beneath U’Sumi’s arm, fighting to keep control.

  A’Nu-Ahki opened his mouth to answer. Then everything changed.

  The Old Man laughed—a sound rising against the relentless waves of fear like a great sea wall. “Have you lived most of your life in the Temple and served the Watchers with unknowing zeal, yet never seen them?”

  T’Qinna looked up again at the cold gray-glow-men, this time with all the observation skills Mnemosynae had trained into her. “They’re the strange men in my mother’s chamber while she was pregnant—or ones almost like them! I saw them inject some kind of black fluid into her arm. Even after I remembered her death, I wasn’t sure if that part hadn’t still been a dream.”

  She looked up at U’Sumi. “They speak through the priests and priestesses, or in an oracle. Few of us ever saw them. In fact, some of us in the lower orders even secretly doubted they really existed at all. Only those chosen for direct sacred marriage in Aztlan spoke as if they’d seen.”

  A’Nu-Ahki said, “Oh they exist, all right. Make no mistake, they are powerful and dangerous to those who don’t know their true nature and who are seduced into doing their bidding. But Yafutu’s right. They cannot stand against us as long as we stand in E’Yahavah’s protection. They come now merely to collect their own.” His words broke with an agonized sob, as the implications must have come home to him.

  T’Qinna wanted to rush over and hug U’Sumi’s father, but he still worked on Yafutu to stanch the bleeding.

  The creature that crouched over Isha’Tahar stood and appeared to give some kind of directions to the others. He then stooped again, gently lifted the Queen, and carried her up the tongue ramp into the breathing liquid meat—metal abomination.

  “Samyaza!” U’Sumi shouted. “That was Samyaza!”

  Tylurnis spoke. “Of course it’s Samyaza! Who did you think?”

  “You’ve seen him like that before?”

  She glared at him with a hatred far beyond Isha’Tahar’s scorpion eyes—an entirely human contempt that needed no demonic enhancement—infinitely deeper in substance, yet incapable of expressing itself so fully only because of its form in human frailty. “I’ve seen Samyaza unclothed in all his glory! I’ve kept his bed and shared him with the Queen for decades, you young idiot! Not all the children I have belong to his two sons.”

  U’Sumi’s head reeled at her words, but his first thought went to his father, as if to somehow shield him from them.

  A’Nu-Ahki looked up at his daughter from Yafutu’s wound, his face ashen. He said nothing, but U’Sumi saw the triple agony in his eyes.

  Tylurnis cooed, “You look surprised, Pahp.”

  A’Nu-Ahki trembled, pressing on Yafutu’s injury, while tears flowed at the corners of his eyes.

  U’Sumi stepped between them. “Leave him alone!”

  At his sudden movement, the four Watchers leaped forward as if to grab U’Sumi away. They never made contact.

  All four flew backwards, little stick figure dolls caught in a heat-lion’s windstorm. Yet not a breath of air stirred in the clearing. When they landed, they simply picked themselves up again, brushed themselves off, and walked slowly back to stand before U’Sumi and his half-sisters. Only this time, they avoided the son of A’Nu-Ahki like fire.

  “If you’ve let Samyaza have you, that’s your business! But why torment our father with it?”

  She shrugged and smirked. “Just felt like it, I guess.”

  Tylurnis made a step to go around U’Sumi, and join the glow-frog crew of Samyaza’s devouring monster-disk, but her brother blocked her.

  “You saw what happened to the Watchers when they tried to touch me!” he said, wanting to save her life despite the rage he felt against her. “You don’t have to go back there.”

  “Pahpa raised you well, boy!” She spit in his face. “E’Yahavah’s going to wipe out the world, but you can save your own skin, little mahm, if you leave your babies to die in the flames—or drown in the flood—or whatever! Nothing ever changes with you people, does it? It always comes down to an inhuman and impossible choice!”

  At that moment, faster than thoughts could form into words, U’Sumi knew that his seer’s gift was upon him.

  “The bruises on you and your sister—that you hide with cosmetics—they didn’t come from Ayyaho and Ivvayi, or Samyaza, did they? And how would you even know if any of your sons are Samyaza’s? Based on what you just said, they could be sons of the Giants, which Samyaza only says are his. And what about the priests, sister? What about all those priests and all those potions? Dreams or reality—you have no way to know anymore, do you?”

  A sinking terror gripped her eyes, with a squeaking sound caught in her throat that tried, but failed, to become a reply.

  U’Sumi pressed his advantage. “Such sons of joy must grow fast and strong to be able to beat their mothers so. Which side of the family do you think this little violent streak comes from?”

  “Please!” cried A’Nu-Ahki, “I’m begging you, ‘Nissa, ‘Ranna, don’t go into that thing! The Basilisk owns them heart and soul!”

  Uranna, still dazed from her head wound, said nothing. Tylurnis looked for a moment as if she were weighing her father’s plea. Then her eyes went cold, and she shoved U’Sumi aside.

  This time he made no move to stop her. When she and her sister reached the polypy hands of their Watcher escorts, Tylurnis paused, and turned for one last word.

  “If you really want to know why I did it, Pahpa, it’s not that hard. You were marrying me off to that gawky army sub-altern—you know the same clam-headed bunch that sent us women and children out the wrong gates and got us slaughtered like sacrificial sheep! Back in Salaam-Surupag, soldier-boy and I used to sneak out at night. A pathetic excuse for lovemaking it was too! Now the titans, after I got used to their looks, they knew how to please a woman, and they were competent protectors! And if they were good, then their father was—well, to put it bluntly—their father was divine.”

  The women and the gray Watchers turned and made for the pulsating disk. Once they disappeared into the belly, the thing retracted its tongue and legs, as it slowly lifted from the ground until it hovered just over the trees. Then it whisked away silently eastward, over the wide river. The velocity was so instant that it should have crushed its passengers to death.

  U’Sumi noticed that three small indentation marks remained where the disk’s landing prongs had touched the earth. A burn stain curled the ferns and mosses inside the triangle. When the object disappeared beyond the forests on the other bank, so did the sense of oppression in the clearing.

  But not the sorrow.

  Yafutu began to cough up large amounts of blood. U’Sumi knew the boy was fading fast and that his father could do nothing to save him.

  “She shouldn’t have said those horrible things to you, my Father,” whispered the dying boy.

  A’Nu-Ahki said, “Shhh. Save your strength, Son.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Yafutu coughed more blood. “All those—all those lion men—those kherubar—they’re here to carry me to a place—a place with a name like yours—Comfort. I’m going to the Fields of A’Nu-Ahki, to the place called Comfort with the lion people. Amirdu would be happy.”

  The boy
smiled at his adopted family, and said no more.

  T

  he astra had crashed at a point where the Gihunu river turned south, nearest the eastern slopes of the N’Zar mountain chain, not two days march from the pass between the lower Haunted Lands and upper Akh’Uzan.

  After U’Sumi stripped several intact rotary automatic hand-cannons, with as many ammunition belts as he could wear, from the dead sky-lords around the wreckage, they set out for home.

  A’Nu-Ahki and U’Sumi carried Yafutu’s body high up into the mountain gap, where they laid the boy to rest under a cairn of heavy rocks. His remains would be safe from the scavenging wurms of the river forests.

  By dusk of the fourth day, they climbed the trail to Q’Enukki’s Retreat. Even in the half-light, U’Sumi noticed things had changed considerably in the two years he had been away. The village, which they avoided, had grown by as much as a third. In the foothill woods, past the village meadow, they found a new shrine carved into the rocky facing where the bat caves used to open from the lower cliffs. There they bumped into an acolyte, who was just locking up for the night.

  The young man did not recognize A’Nu-Ahki and U’Sumi in the shadows. “Sorry,” he said, “Shrine’s closed for the evening. Come again tomorrow. There’s an inn down in the village.”

  U’Sumi said, “What kind of shrine is this?”

  The Acolyte seemed taken aback. “Don’t you know where you are? This is Q’Enukki’s Retreat! That’s the shrine of Atum-Ra’s Barque, and the Three Gifts that used to rest at Paru’Ainu.”

  A’Nu-Ahki thanked him, and they continued up to the fortress gate.

  U’Sumi pounded for admittance and shouted out who they were. Finally, movement came from inside. The sound of the lock bar preceded the opening of the great creaking doors.

  Both U’Sumi and his father almost dropped to the ground.

  Before them, lit by the courtyard fire, stood Iyapeti, alive, and looking as healthy as the day they had all left Akh’Uzan with the war party. He froze; jaw hanging for what seemed several minutes, but probably was only about ten seconds. Then he threw himself at his father and brother, and wept.