“This is not over!” Uruk’s specter said, before dissolving into cockatrice form again for the last time.
Nu pulled himself to sitting position against the giant tree root, and caught his breath. The pack followed their matriarch off into the trees. The noise of many armed men approached, and the wurms were heavy and unwilling to clash with them from having just fed.
“What am I?” A’Nu-Ahki asked the shaft of light.
No answer came but the rustle of leaves.
“A
nother unicorn!” Muhet’Usalaq shouted. His reddish-brown hands jerked in the air. “That makes five in less than so many years! Have you any idea how much it costs to hatch and train a quasi-dragon? We are fortunate your tracker took the spiker’s tail by its base and avoided serious injury. He got himself clear of the area too, only he managed to retrieve his mount! Now, that took bush savvy!”
Wall tapestries fluttered in the breeze through the windows of the red clay palace, as if animated by the ire of A’Nu-Ahki’s grandfather. Gold-white skies smiled outside like shiny brass madness on the forest and river.
“I am sorry, my Father,” Nu said, using the Formal Voice, eyes down. “I will pay double for the lost mount.”
“You will do nothing of the sort, though the Ten Heavens know you should! I suppose this is your way of squirming out of the Hunt again.”
A cloud passed in front of the sun outside.
Nu’s eyes came up like swords. “The Hunt? Quasi-dragons? Why is it we call unicorns that, anyway? Does a prefix change what they are? Do the priests and elders think no one notices the word game just because it’s taboo for the Dragon-slayer Order to use dragons to fight other dragons? You have many grandsons. Why do you, as Salaam-Surupag’s Prime Zaqen, take such personal interest in the exploits of one lackluster hunt-captain?”
Muhet’Usalaq did not blink. “Stop pretending to be so juvenile, Nu. You are heir and almost a junior zaqen. You may be the Comforter from E’Yahavah A’Nu, but that does not shelter you from basic responsibilities. The Archon gave your father’s prophecy only tentative confirmation. So the people say, ‘wait and see,’ while they dismiss ‘Comforter prophecies’ as being too vague to really mean anything. That puts the larger burden of proof on us! Have you no sense of pride for your place among our people?”
“Pride! Is that all this is to you? Haven’t you heard what’s been going on out in the bush lately? Used to be we’d have to pick fights with reclusive crop-stompers just to keep up our training. Now all wurm-kin swarms through this place. It gets worse every season. I’ve made report after report! Where are they going and why? The Haunted Lands? Nobody seems to know or care! It’s just track them, kill them, pray the invocation and the exorcism after each kill, and don’t ask any questions!”
Muhet’Usalaq said, “I read your reports. It’s your field-work that…”
Nu cut him off. “I know I’m no real huntsman! I don’t claim to be, but I’m not stupid, either. I’m nearly three hundred years old. Don’t you think it’s time you stopped treating me like a ‘tween?” The reddish-tan skin on the back of his hands beaded with cold sweat, as he noticed a look on his grandfather’s face that he had never seen before—an expression he did not quite know how to deal with; Amusement?
“You are right, Nu, I need to stop doing that—well, I am going to try to stop doing it quite so much, at least.”
Did Pahpi just admit he’s wrong?
The Old Man raised his finger, and started to pace the chamber. “Though you reek with deficiency in practical matters—even sacred ones like the Hunt—you do excel in scholarship, medicine, astronomy, and knowledge of the Prophecies. Your punishment is to accompany me to Sa-utar as my aide for the upcoming council. I need a man who is unafraid to strip the mold that eats at the foundation stones of our civilization, and who knows the difference between mold and stone. Too many of the Zaqenar do not. They cannot be trusted because of it.”
Nu arched a single brow. “I’m being punished with a promotion?”
Muhet’Usalaq glowered. “Do not let it go to your head. It is only to shelter your father’s prophecy from further ridicule around here.”
“Oh, of course it is. I would never imply otherwise! But I have no seer’s gift, only a scholar’s eye…” Recollection of his cockatrice encounter hit Nu as he spoke. I was protected from them, not by them!
“No matter—I had no gift until E’Yahavah took my father from the world. Your father had none until the day you were born. E’Yahavah El-N’Lil will give you yours when it suits him. Get your affairs in order, and feel free to bring your lovely wife—although this will be strictly business.”
A’Nu-Ahki thanked him, but declined on bringing his spouse. “We have daughters in courtship. The other families are good folks, but some of them are about as skilled at supervising ‘tween-agers as I am at leading the Hunt. If Emzara stays, she can watch things.”
“No matter, just be ready quickly. We leave the day after Rest Day.” Muhet’Usalaq flipped the back of a gnarly brown hand at him in dismissal.
Nu paused. He almost told him of the vision during the cockatrice incident, but decided against it. It was probably just his head wound anyway, and there was no sense picking any fights with Uruk should he find out about it. Age had mellowed Nu’s cousin some—but not much.
A’
Nu-Ahki still bore a euphoric grin of disbelief when he returned to his wharf-mansion. His wife met him in the inner court gardens.
Emzara said, “What is it, Nu? You look like sky chariots came for you.” Her gold eyes danced like fire as she joined him in the flower beds.
“Almost! Pahpi’s promoted me to an advisory position. That’s zaqen territory. This after I finally stood up to him and spoke my mind.”
She stopped walking, hand on her hip, and cocked her body in a way he always found inviting. “I hope you didn’t speak all of it.”
He laughed and kissed her smooth mahogany forehead. “I wasn’t banished, was I? He’s never liked the way I handle myself in the bush.”
“People fight the Basilisk in different ways. The worst dragons don’t have scales and teeth. He’s wise enough to know that.”
“I guess I never thought I’d hear him admit it, that’s all. Even so, he’s more than happy to let me wonder at his real motives.”
Emzara bit her lower lip and took his hand, while her eyes sparkled up at his playfully. “You can’t take away all the Old Man’s fun, can you?”
“The Ten Heavens forbid.”
They strolled into the foyer, arm-in-arm.
Their two-storied house faced its landward side in baked red-orange brick, while teak wood levels stretched on gigantic pilings out into the wide river in back. A half-wall of brick curled around a fireplace, partly enclosing the landward side of the breezeway greeting chamber on the inside, which blocked much of the river view. Nu and his wife came in behind the hearth, and turned at the half-wall toward the library.
That was where they heard noises.
A shuffle and some stifled girlish giggling came from behind the waist-high room divider.
Emzara stopped short and detached herself from Nu to lean over the barrier to investigate.
“What do you think you are doing behind there?” she said to the unseen culprits.
Up jumped four ‘tween-agers—Nu’s unmarried daughters with the boys who would be their husbands in about six more years—if Nu let them live that long.
A’Nu-Ahki was in too good a mood to be instantly cross, but the youngsters’ mussed up hair and loosened clothing forced him to put on a sober face that grew darker as the implications came home.
He addressed the young men first. “You two, go. I’ll call for you when it’s alright to come back.”
The boys, one a young soldier fresh in from the War Academy, and probably all the more hot-blooded because of it, scrambled around the wall and out the garden door. The two girls still fidgeted with their clothes and tried to smoo
th their hair.
“Uranna, Tylurnis, talk.”
Uranna said, “That’s just it. We were talking is all.”
A’Nu-Ahki’s eyes must have flared, for the two girls took a step back from the hearth-wall. For a split second, he felt like he was still catching his breath near the pack of flesh-gorging cockatrici. The impression pricked him, and vanished, leaving something dark to throb in his spirit.
He paused and wondered what had just happened.
“Talking needs no hair or garment adjustments,” their mother said.
Tylurnis said, just a bit too quickly, “We slid along the wall as we sat. It messed our clothes and hair. We should have picked a better place for courtship visit. It must have given the wrong idea. It won’t happen again.”
The girls were twin images of Emzara at an earlier age; golden eyes, red-streaked sienna hair like bronzed halos of fire around polished earthen-toned faces. Nu tried not to play favorites with his children, but the twins made it hard. Sometimes there was no resisting their identical dimpled grins.
Both now smiled perfect rows of pearl teeth up at him with a forced tightness that somehow revealed grinning skulls not far beneath the flesh of their faces—twin skulls set in wreaths of livid bronze flame.
Nu shook himself free of the image. “Well enough, ‘Nissa. Both of you, off to your evening chores now.”
The twins fluttered away, their clothes like flapping wings on a pair of raptors shooed from a soldier’s corpse. Flaming Watchers, what a weird day! Nu heard their giggles trail off into the house’s vastness, and shivered.
His wife turned to him, eyes of soft fire. “Nu, was that really wise?”
“What? It could have been as they said.”
“Could have, but I doubt it!”
“Come on, Emza, they’re young. They have poor judgment at times. None of the older girls turned out badly, and they each had their share of wisdom lapses while learning the social graces.”
“Hiding?”
He shrugged. “It wouldn’t have been hiding if we’d have come in through the river door, they’d have been in plain sight.”
Doubt seemed to cloud Emzara’s eyes. Then she shrugged and smiled up at him. “Well, done is done.”
A’Nu-Ahki laughed. “I suppose it’s a good thing you’re getting so suspicious in your old age, since I have to leave right after Rest Day with Pahpi for Sa-utar. I could be gone several weeks.”
“Old age!” She socked his arm and grinned. “Weeks?”
He told her about the council, and Muhet’Usalaq’s distrust of the Zaqenar. As he spoke, her eyes narrowed.
“Nu, be careful,” she said when he finished.
“Why? It’s just an Upper Family council. It’s not like I’ve never been to one before—just not up front as an adviser.”
Her eyes pleaded. “I grew up there, Love. The Archon’s city is not a Seer Clan freehold like Salaam-Surupag, despite Archon Iyared’s fondness for his vanished son. In Sa-utar a council is never just a council and nobody is ever really who they seem.”
But for what degree of zeal they had formerly shown for virtue, they now shewed by their actions a double degree of wickedness, whereby they made God to be their enemy; for many angels of God accompanied with women, and begat sons that proved unjust, and despisers of all that was good, on account of the confidence they had in their own strength, for the tradition is that these men did what resembled the acts of those whom the Grecians call giants.
—Flavius Josephus
Antiquities of the Jews 3:1
(Circa 95 AD)
2
Envoy
T
he Obelisks of Fire and Water at Sa-utar stood like twin sentries of bronze, brick, and stone, helpless against the mob’s violence. They watched over a garden, until recently a fraction of mystic Aeden’s beauty, which now lay trampled under thousands of angry feet. The monoliths warned of the two World-ends in raised hieroglyphs with meanings devalued more by each passing generation. The rioters only noticed to avoid crushing against them.
On a fortification wall overlooking the ravaged flowerbeds, three men watched the soldiers clear a path through the mob for an ambassadorial caravan. The youngest, A’Nu-Ahki son of Lumekki, tried to peer down into the strange self-propelled chariot that carried the dignitaries. The vehicle’s reflective glass windows blocked his view.
“That will be Avarnon-Set’s group,” said the eldest, Muhet’Usalaq of Salaam-Surupag. He and A’Nu-Ahki had arrived late last night.
The third man—Muhet’Usalaq’s brother, Urugim—lived in a tree palace just outside Sa-utar. He leaned against the parapet with his face half turned from the ruckus, as if disinterested. His thick woolly hair, like a million tiny salt and pepper springs, pressed against the stone. However, Nu saw that he always kept one eye trained on the caravan.
Muhet’Usalaq continued, “Our delegation returned from Ayar Adi’In with news that the Khavilak Sacred Mercantile has formally joined Lumekkor’s Alliance. The Archon will hear them and this envoy from Bab’Tubila next. Oh, and the rioters demand we join too—unconditionally.”
Nu asked, “Why then do they block the way of the Nae-fil consul?”
Urugim said, “They want a look at the Beast. Rumors say he has the head of a wolven-hound.”
“That would insult wolven-hounds everywhere,” Muhet’Usalaq said. “He is just misshapen like most of his ilk.”
“I think it more than a mere deformity—at least by accounts I have heard from those who have actually seen him. They say his eyes have no whites in them at all, just solid hate-filled obsidian—except that they glow coldly in the dark like some preternatural predator’s. The shape of his head seems to shift in subtle ways the longer you look at him, according to some. They say at times it is more wolfishly long at the snout, at others more ape-like, and then merely like a hairy disfigured man—all at a single encounter.”
Muhet’Usalaq snorted. “People make too much of him. The truly disturbing thing is that Adiyuri rides with him. It is a rare honor having a candidate for Archon-in-Waiting as your personal escort. If that were not bad enough, the priesthood also wants Iyared to join.”
A’Nu-Ahki slapped his palm against the parapet. “How can they? I know there are sympathizers, but to completely sell out?”
“They either do not see it that way, or imagine they can still turn things around through further appeasement,” the Elder almost spat, his brown face crinkled in what seemed an almost physical pain.
“So now our own priests also serve the fallen Watchers!”
“Oh, not in word,” Urugim said. “They have been careful about that! But in substance, they copy Uzaaz’El’s undermining of Iyared’s foreign and domestic policies. The Alliance has patrons in every Family tier; all claiming to be ‘personally opposed to foreign Temple vices,’ while they promote Erdu’s anti-dogmas and stifling economic regulations to open up our cities to those same vices and the debt that inevitably follows them. They dress it in cleverly redefined words from Atum-Ra’s Rite to make it palatable to our elders, but ‘down’ is the new ‘up,’ and ‘cold’ is now ‘hot,’ all the same.”
Nu grimaced. “And if I called them dragon-tongues I’d have every little old lady in Seti whining about what a hatemonger I am.”
“Something like that.”
“They’re making us look like fools, you know. That they do it so easily bothers me!”
“Half of Seti wants change! You think we made it easy for them?”
Nu glared. “In some ways, yes!”
“What?” Urugim looked to Muhet’Usalaq. When his brother kept silent, Urugim’s eyes fell.
Nu explained, “We tend to lecture the younger generations in stuffy High Archaic without giving them compelling reasons to care if what we say is even true. No, don’t tell me about threats of Divine wrath and World-end—even the words we use to describe those things have become cliché and unreal to them! We talk down to them rather than reason
with them. We hardly even understand their dialect when they live in our very own homes!”
“Is it so wrong that they should learn the Language as it was given?”
“It’s not about that! Alliance-sympathizing sages actually study Younger-speech. They’ve convinced academy ‘tweens that they care and we don’t! Theaters gush with misleading heart-wrenching dramas with themes that systematically suggest the ugliest possible assumptions about the teachings of the Seers. By the time we react, we look weak and phony!”
Urugim shouted, “Are you blaming us for their apostasy?”
“Of course not! I’m saying that telling people what to think without adequately equipping them with reasoning skills never ends well.”
“Pah! You are not even a First Tier zaqen yet, A’Nu-Ahki! Do you think anyone wants to reason anymore? You have no idea how hard it is to kill this thousand-headed hydra worming through every civilized institution, eating at the foundations! Talk to me when you have been at it for five hundred more years!”
Muhet’Usalaq laughed—something that grated Nu’s nerves—and put an arm around the shoulders of both men. “Peace, Uru. The youngster is right. We too often confirm the enemy’s propaganda by how we respond to opposition. They bait us, and we jump for it. We’ve spiritualized everything, and retreated from academics, the arts, and the practical sciences.”
“There aren’t enough of us left to cover every gap! They shunned our scholars centuries ago! The Academy is the worst viper nest of all!”
Muhet’Usalaq said, “The Sacred Academy of today is a prostituted institution—I think Nu would agree…”
A’Nu-Ahki vigorously nodded.
“I think what the boy is saying is that many of us, in our desperation, have deserted an appreciation of learning itself—not on purpose, but because opposition has too often come from sages who systematically use the tools of reason to violate reason. Our father would have never done this. What is now ‘Low Archaic’ used to be the Younger-speech of his day. Though we have fought well on other fronts, we have been complacent here, Uru. Whoever controls the Academy shapes the future. I fear we will pay for it soon in young blood. I may not live to such a ripe old age.”
Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1) Page 3