Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  “Thou callest this ‘progress?’ Thy mind-robbing sorcery with its potions, and whoredom—with ensuing plagues and madness—spreadeth like gangrene. Political intrigues hath become gamings where thine Alliance absorbeth tribe after tribe. In Assuri, where many of mine own sons once lived, are empty villages left from slaughters instigated by these men of renown who claimeth for themselves the parentage of gods.

  “You want us to join thee? Yet thy hands art stained with our blood! Ye Watchers and their spawn hath seduced our daughters, bullied us, and insulted our fathers and Seers. Now thou wishest us to believe they are the fulfillment of our most cherished prophetic hopes?” Iyared’s laugh was a creak of ancient tortured wood. “What makes thee think we are that stupid?”

  Zegus folded his arms around himself in a motherly hug. “Eldest Father, I cry pardon for my lack of clarity. I beg leave to explain better…”

  Iyared cut him off. “Thou art perfectly clear, Childe Zegus. Do not upbraid thyself so. Thou speakest tragically of a divided people. More tragic still is a united people who arrogantly imagine they can redefine their own Creator. As for me, I sense that thou, Zegus, wishest me to bless thy folly, whilst Avarnon-Set is here to dictate terms to me if I do not. Thus it is a waste of my time to pretend we can ever come to an accord.”

  “But… but your Eminence…” Zegus sputtered.

  “This hearing is over,” Iyared said. “My constables are ordered to escort these envoys to the West Gate and send them peaceably away.”

  Avarnon-Set shot up from his seat. “I would speak!” His voice screeched like locusts on the horizon. The misshapen bulges of his head pulsated through his stretched hood like a sack of squashed faces pressed in airless panic against the inside of some huge taut wineskin for trapped souls. Still the Giant refused to show even the common courtesy of revealing his face. Only his huge insect eyes shone out of the cowl’s blackness.

  The Archon said, “Be brief.”

  “We came with gifts for your people—marvels greater than the quickfire that lights this hall and makes the night of your city as day. Since we cannot dissuade your resisting progress, I hope your people enjoy isolation.”

  With that, the constables herded envoys out politely, but with a lack of normal diplomatic protocol. Behind them, shocked and confused elders bewailed the loss of further technical aid, or spoke of imminent war. Adiyuri sat in the Chair of Appointment, face buried in his hands.

  Iyared slumped in his chair, and fumbled for his quickfire voice enhancer. “Children, can we have order?” He trailed into wheezing coughs.

  Nobody listened.

  The Archon took a deep breath, and roared into the box-like device, lapsing from his customary High Archaic dialect. “Shut up, all of you!”

  The hall became silent.

  “I am convoking an emergency session of the High Council and whatever advisory staff present, as of now. What is the situation in the city?”

  Muhet’Usalaq said, “I just came from the Obelisk Garden Wall.”

  “The Chair recognizeth Muhet’Usalaq.”

  “My operatives confirm three factions acting together. This intelligence is solid, since my men were embedded in the suspect groups.”

  Nu sat up. My grandfather has operatives spying on the enemy?

  “The main group calls itself ‘Children of New-world’ and is lavishly financed by outside agitators that have ideological influence over all three sects. The other two factions are local and mostly sincere in their belief that El-N’Lil is leading us to Alliance union. The larger engages in non-violent protest. The smaller, ‘Aeden’s Dawn,’ wants to overthrow the Archonate if their demands are unmet. Urugim’s men have infiltrated both sects. Even now this ‘Aeden’s Dawn’ is being taken for questioning about today’s riots.”

  Muhet’Usalaq looked down at a small finger-scroll that a page had just handed to him. “Their latest demands are simple: First, they want us to join the Alliance. Secondly, we must open dialogue with Khavilakki, and be willing to broaden our definition of orthodoxy. Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, they demand that Adiyuri be named officially as Appointed.”

  The auditorium erupted into angry exchanges that brought on another call for silence from the Archon.

  Adiyuri nervously raised his pudgy hand for the floor.

  Iyared said, “I recognizeth Adiyuri.”

  “Rather than pursue this ugly insinuation, I will point out hard facts. The military engineering of the sons of Tubaal-qayin has advanced beyond our comprehension! Based on my firsthand observation, I doubt our city-states could stand against it for even an hour! I honestly ask; has E’Yahavah chosen to defend our point of view? Look at the purges in Assuri! As the Father said, there is not an Orthodox family left in the entire Near South!”

  Adiyuri swept his arm toward Muhet’Usalaq and Urugim. “Does not the blood staining the cliffs of Regati shout that we have been facing this the wrong way? Excellent Muhet’Usalaq, your own brother Guidad died there! Is it fair that we willfully invite the same fate onto our children here?”

  Muhet’Usalaq drilled Adiyuri with his eyes until the older man flinched. “My brother knew what to expect in Assuri. He believed the prophecies of the Seers, and was willing to die for them. Are you?”

  “The prophecies of the Seers, of course—but not the self-fulfilling variety you want to engineer in my vanished brother’s name!”

  Muhet’Usalaq repeated facts known to all; “Past council decided that Q’Enukki’s words hold equal weight with previous Seers, sealed by Archonic Decree. I witnessed my father’s vanishing in a moment of shadow, then the light of the celestial chariot that took him into the heavens. He saw a winnowing of our people before the Obelisk World-ends…”

  Adiyuri pounded the dais. “There is a difference between believing in a dire prediction, and trying to make it happen!”

  “Make it happen?” Muhet’Usalaq’s laughter could eat through stone. “I was not the one who urged we withdraw from Zhri’Nikkor! I did not tell former Archons ‘we had no interests in the Far West!’ You and your so-called ‘Moderates’ pulled our forces back to ‘fight for Orthodoxy at home!’ Would Lumekkor have seized the West Straits, or the Samyaza Cult Assuri, if we had kept up our strategic interests as I wished? If I wanted to engineer our fall, Adiyuri, I would have hired your party to do just as you did!”

  Iyared shouted, “Silence, both of you! I am dismissing all but mine advisory staff. This will now be a closed session!”

  Nu’s heart sank. He wanted to stay and hear the outcome. He turned to Muhet’Usalaq, who hastily scrawled a message on a scrap of papyrus.

  “Give this to our courier and have him make his best speed home and deliver it to your father—eyes only. Seal it before you release it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Instructions.”

  “For what?”

  Muhet’Usalaq growled at him, “Just do as you are told!” Then he softened his voice to a whisper, “Nu, you will want to attach a note of your own for your wife and sons to start packing—only necessities, mind you—for a big move. Tell them to be watchful and ready to travel on short notice.”

  A’Nu-Ahki took the papyrus and left the rotunda. He found it odd that his grandfather had not sealed it. Wax was available in the dais hall.

  Once beyond the doors, and the gaze of prying eyes, he sneaked a look at the note, feeling a twinge of guilt as he did so. It read:

  We will be staying. Execute “Leviathan.”

  The tides are coming.

  Cold sweat dribbled down A’Nu-Ahki’s spine as he rolled the tiny papyrus.

  Muhet’Usalaq—His death shall bring it.

  But as Jared died, tears streamed down his face by reason of his great sorrow, for the children of Seth, who had fallen in his days.

  —2 Adam 21:14

  (Circa First Century AD)

  3

  Archons

  N

  atural mineral springs gurgled up from
the netherworld to massage A’Nu-Ahki’s body, and bubble his mind free of the day’s tensions. He thought; Emzara must have loved this place as a child!

  It had not taken all five months since the rejected envoys for him to fall in love with his granduncle’s forest estate, especially the geyser pond. In that time he had not, to his frustration, come any closer to understanding plan “Leviathan” than when he had first peeked at his grandfather’s note to Lumekki. Instead, he had learned that there were many levels of insidedness to being on the inside. He apparently existed only in the outermost ring.

  Nu watched; eyes just above the water’s surface, as a bright blue scamper the size of a chicken launched itself from a palm frond to capture a dragonfly in mid leap with its forward claws. The little creature landed, and then tore off across the lawn on ostrichy hind legs, clutching the giant insect.

  The lawn was actually a spongy moss that cushioned the forest floor between the pool and the stairs of Urugim’s tree mansion. The estate was a padded world for a padded mind taking a brief respite from the many jagged issues beyond. The scamper paused to bite the head off its prey.

  Gold-orange afternoon sky light showered down through the leaves in sprinkly fish scales across the platform halls in the forest’s middle terrace. Some of the sparkles even penetrated to the tree-trunk ladder bases. A’Nu-Ahki hoped to own a home just like it—if the world lasted that long.

  “Having ourselves a posh little soak?” Muhet’Usalaq’s voice cut through the shady silence from the stony bank behind A’Nu-Ahki’s head.

  Nu said, “Just thought I’d cool off a bit.” He thrust himself up from the water and waded ashore to his clothes. Shaking off, he flipped back a thick head full of raven black hair, and secretly hoped to catch the Old Man in its spray.

  “You are here to work, Nu, not bask in the geyser pool.”

  “Is there anything I’ve left undone?”

  Muhet’Usalaq crinkled his face into a peppery grimace, as if he could rattle off a list. Instead, he shook his head and changed the subject. “Iyared wants to see us. I do not think he will last much longer.”

  “Is he going to name you?”

  “As if that would solve our problems? I guess we will soon know.”

  Nu slid into his tunic, kilt, and belt-wrap. He was still fastening himself when Urugim pulled up in a large open coach drawn by two onagers.

  The ride to the city took about a half-hour through giant cedar-filled highlands, and from the gates to the Archon’s palace, another hour more along avenues choked with crowded outdoor markets and artisan shops. Up the once wealthy side streets, Nu saw many ancient domed mansions dull from having had their plating of orichalcum scraped off to help pay foreign debts. Many of these were dark and empty, boarded, or bricked up to keep out squatters and looters.

  The single-room baked-brick domiciles in poorer sections of town, however, exploded with people, piled on top of each other in mountainous tenements like great ant hills of cubes accessed by a jumble of crude wooden ladders. Rowdy laughter and angry shouts echoed from these, while half-naked children played in the narrow by-ways between them.

  The three men rode in silence, each deep in their own thoughts. The Archon was to Muhet’Usalaq and Urugim what Muhet’Usalaq was to Nu. Iyared had founded Salaam-Surupag, and had been its original Prime Zaqen. The two elders must have had many childhood memories of him. For A’Nu-Ahki, however, the Archon was a distant icon of authority—a relic as old as half of human history. I should not have been so quick to leave Emza home.

  The sun set in blazing magentas as the chariot finally entered the palace gates, and wound its way up the zigzagging parkway to the highest tier. Fortress-like cliffs towered over them, lit in wine-colored afterglow—the first ramparts of the forbidding Kharir Aedenu—the Mountains of Aeden. Many days’ journey across that impenetrable wall hid the Forbidden Orchard—the paradise lost to humanity at history’s dawn.

  Livery men met the coach as Urugim reined it to a halt before the upper chamber colonnade. The house physicians were there to greet them.

  “How is he?” Muhet’Usalaq asked as he dismounted.

  The Chief Healer answered, “Weak, but fairly lucid. I do not expect him to live out the night though.”

  Urugim said, “He has risked much by waiting for the last minute to do this.” He slapped the reins into the hands of an unready stable man.

  “I tried to tell him so,” said the Healer, who was also one of Muhet’Usalaq’s most trusted operatives. “But the Archon has always been one to keep his own counsel.”

  The physicians led them up the colonnade stairs, past a row of pink granite pillars, and into a colossal antechamber constructed of blue-gray kapar stone blocks. Mosaics and tapestries checkered the walls, depicting scenes from the earliest human history.

  The far panel began with the creation of Atum-Ra, and the drawing forth of Ish’Hakka from his side—all done with inlaid tiles. Next to it, emerged the Basilisk before his dismemberment—a brilliant raised dragon with scales and a feathered crest made from set jewels of emerald, ruby, and topaz. It stood upright on two hind legs, much as the cockatrice matriarch had, only with a beauty and nobility that no wurm could ever possess today.

  Beyond that, another tapestry showed their parent’s expulsion from Aeden and the terror of the Fire-Sphinx set to guard the eastern pass with his flaming sword. Last on the wall came a picture of the First Sacrifice, and the giving of the Three Gifts to Atum-Ra and his wife at the Treasure Cave of Paru’Ainu on the Isle of the Dead between the cataracts of Aeden’s River.

  The opposite panel depicted the murder of Heh’Bul by Qayin, and the falling star Umara, which had smitten the land of Nhod in the east, and made the soil bitter in the region where Qayin was doomed to roam. This wall ended its history with the birth of Seti, who became the Appointed One—the father of A’Nu-Ahki’s people, and heir to Atum-Ra’s throne.

  The physicians led them up a staircase of polished amethyst to a mezzanine that overlooked the great chamber. The Archon’s private quarters lay opened at the end of the hall, carved right into the cliff.

  Inside, Iyared’s divan curtains were drawn open on three sides, with the Archon propped up on pillows at the head of his bed.

  Facing the entrance; Adiyuri stood with his eldest son, Kunyari, and Kunyari’s eldest, Rakhau. Rakhau’s eldest, Tarbet, stood a pace behind, to the left of his father, ceremonially relegated to the background because of his youth. The elder men looked as if they could each be an image of the same man at different stages of middle to senior age—all flabby, and the younger men with painted eyes more effeminate than those of their fathers.

  Tarbet did not resemble any of his elders, however, except in his non-traditional smooth-shaved face. Trim and naturally handsome, he seemed considerably younger than Nu, although that might have been from lack of a beard. His cosmetically enlarged eyes fluttered all over the room, as if bored and impatient to leave. Aside from an overly decorated prince’s braid, he kept his shiny brown hair close-cropped in a style popular among the great cities of Lumekkor, but not so much in the Orthodox City-States, except among the very young.

  Nu had not frittered his time away at Sa-utar nearly so much as Muhet’Usalaq seemed to imagine. He had made several discreet inquiries about the principle players in the power struggle at hand. These yielded much information about his counterpart from Adiyuri’s Line, none of it savory. Not Rakhau’s original firstborn, Tarbet had inherited the honor only after an uncannily convenient string of accidents and illnesses had killed his four elder brothers. As one courtier had put it, “It’s safer to be Tarbet’s goat than his brother—and, like the Qayinim, Tarbet eats the red meat.”

  Tarbet’s father was less interesting—though not to the palace rumor-mongers. Rakhau had remarkable luck with women, despite his being such a bloated grease pouch. Kunyari was the same as Rakhau, except that here the gossips had more to work with—an ancient rivalry to spice things up.


  A’Nu-Ahki saw the fiery glare hit Muhet’Usalaq’s eyes when Kunyari looked their way. The palace schmoozes had told Nu that the two zaqenhe’s ancient blood feud went far beyond politics, though none would ever hint how far. Whatever its cause, it related to events before A’Nu-Ahki was born. The intention seemed united among even the most gossip-prone of the Zaqenar that knowledge of those events should die with the generation that had witnessed them. Court politicos of younger years with quicker tongues were as clueless as Nu was beyond that.

  The sunset outside had become wine red.

  Behind Adiyuri’s line, slicing up the bloody glow from the bay window overlooking the city, seven legal scribes stood to record Iyared’s last words, and any oaths taken by the heirs.

  Iyared motioned for both Adiyuri and Muhet’Usalaq to step closer. The Archon’s face seemed locked in a premature rigor mortis, his head nearly withered to a skull. The once bright fire of his blue eyes had dwindled to ashen gray. Nu almost gagged at the smell of death near the divan.

  The Ancient whispered; his emaciated face locked in an age almost a thousand years past, “I sat at the feet of Seti the Great in the height of his glory. Atum-Ra himself was but recently departed and I played as a child in the presence of ancient Khuva, the mother of us all. She told me everything that the records do not tell, though I was but a small boy.

  “I hath watched the greatest of empires sicken to senility under my own hands! I am a failure and I hand thee a kingdom that hath failed.” Dusty eyes flared first at Adiyuri, and then softened to Muhet’Usalaq. “One of you shalt be Archon, but it is the other who shalt receive the greater gift…”

  Adiyuri said, “What greater gift can there be than to follow in your footsteps, my Father?”

  “Shut up and do not interrupt me again!” barked the wax-parchment-bone-relic man, sending himself into a fit of phlegmy coughs. It took him a minute to regulate his breathing again. When he did, he seemed to lapse again into his reverie of things long dead.