Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  “I had just enough time to sweep our tracks back to the trees,” reported one of the assassins to his leader. “They might not see us here.”

  The Lead Assassin, who crouched right behind A’Nu-Ahki, cursed. “They might’ve seen our tread marks where we crossed that open meadow! I knew we should’ve stopped to sweep them once we made the bush again.”

  “Would’ve exposed us for too long,” said the Junior Assassin.

  “If they saw tracks, they’re following our bush furrow right to us!”

  A’Nu-Ahki said, “Maybe not.”

  Both assassins turned and glared at him.

  Nu explained. “When Samyaza first came out with the gas bags they tried several times to attack my ancestor’s monastery. They never could pull it off because the inversion updrafts near the mountains gave them too much trouble. Maybe they’re just following this game trail up through the pass to get back to their base on the other side before sunset, when the winds shift.”

  The Junior Assassin said, “He might be right.”

  The airship pulled past the trees and over-flew the rocky meadow between the wood and the Firedrake, until it hovered above the camouflage canopy. A’Nu-Ahki watched up through the netting as something small and round dropped from the airship’s gondola and plummeted straight at him.

  Rock hounds collecting geodes in the Cosa Mountains of California discovered what appeared to be an electrical device of vast antiquity [inside one of the geodes]…. Even more surprising perhaps is the discovery of an object located on a ship that was sunk in the Aegean Sea before the time of Christ. It appeared to be some kind of mechanical computing device…. The object discovered on this ship sunk before Christ’s time was a fairly sophisticated analog computer…. At first, one might be tempted to think that these and other “out-of-place” artifacts are just a few oddities. However, many such artifacts are known and are documented in various sources…. Instead they attest to a high and technologically advanced civilization in the distant past.

  —Donald E. Chittick

  The Puzzle of Ancient Man:

  Advanced Technology in Past Civilizations?

  14

  Network

  T

  he lacquered canvas hull of the airship shone through with the red light of the lowering sun, casting a bloody glow over the vessel’s wheelhouse.

  “The track furrow disappeared back before those trees!” Sub-Altern Inguska barked over the engine hum. “I can’t find it on this side.”

  “We need to get over the mountains before the sunset inversions get too bad,” the pilot called back to him.

  “We can’t lose them now! It will take weeks to get a decent ground search going this far out!”

  “We can’t risk the pass after sunset! They won’t get far at night. Do you think you can find this place again tomorrow if I drop a marker?”

  The sub-altern glanced around to try to memorize landmarks. The problem was that at this low altitude, near the pass, everything looked alike—an endless labyrinth of gullies stuffed with highland greenery in a miasma of stretched shadows. Only the mountain peaks were useful terrain features, and this close to the ground even some of those were difficult to spot over the nearby lower ridges.

  Inguska said, “I think I can find it again if we leave a trail of them up to the pass.”

  “We have only five. I can maybe drop them at two thousand cubit intervals.”

  “It’ll have to do.”

  S

  plakk!

  Nu was sure the tumbling sphere should have landed on his face. Instead, it exploded on the other side of the bush he hid under, just outside the Firedrake’s canopy net. He had expected to die quickly in an envelope of flame. He could not understand why he felt wet and sticky instead.

  Then he opened his eyes and watched the airship rise above the canyon walls and struggle up toward the pass. Only after the floating colossus disappeared behind a rocky crag did A’Nu-Ahki try to find out why he was wet. He ran his hands over his midsection and discovered spatters of bright orange paste. When he got up from under the bush, he found himself inside the radius of a gigantic paint splat.

  “Cover that mess with dirt and leaves; dress it up good,” the Lead Assassin commanded one of his men. He then jerked his thumb at A’Nu-Ahki. “You, Jek, go wash that stuff off—there’s a streamlet about a hundred cubits off that a-way.” He pointed beyond the Firedrake.

  For some reason, the Leader had taken to calling him “Jek” during the long journey. A’Nu-Ahki had no idea why.

  When he returned from his makeshift bath, A’Nu-Ahki found the assassins setting up their backpacks. One of them pointed Nu to his load. A dry tunic lay folded on top of it. It was the assassins’ way of saying “speed it up” nicely. They said few things nicely.

  The Lead Assassin lifted his pack down from the Firedrake and barked to A’Nu-Ahki in that thick Kushtim brogue Nu was really starting to hate, “Sun’s almost down. Be ready to move, Jek! We be hoofin’ over the pass. The big floaters’ll be bobbing all around this place after sun-up. They’ll prob’ly have a higher watch to cover the pass. I told the Guildies to move camp into the trees after we leave. We’ll hide before dawn and sleep during the day until after the patrols go home for the evening.”

  “What’ll we do once we’re on the other side?”

  “Our contact be a rubber planter. His house is not too far from the foothills at the other end of the pass. Now, hoist that pack, Jek.”

  “My name is A’Nu-Ahki!”

  “Good’nuff, Jek.” The Assassin patted Nu’s shoulder as he would a small child’s and went off to jabber with the Guild mechanic and the drivers. The latter would remain camped with the vehicle until the others returned or else three months passed—whichever came first.

  Nu watched as the Assassin Leader helped the Guildsmen unload from the Firedrake’s concealed roof a strange crystalline pyramid with a metal rod jutting from its apex. It took all four men to lift, and they handled it carefully, as if the object was either important, fragile or both. They hid it in a small wooded gully about a thousand cubits north, completely out of site from the game trail. It was the fourth such device Nu had seen them dispose of at stops along the way.

  When they returned, the four joked together like old friends. The Lead Assassin laughed as he finished instructing the mechanic and drivers in something Nu could not make out except for the end: “Don’t be drinkin’ no spirit juice, Guildies! Old King ‘Baul-qayin put nasty dirties in the fire juice! Make you puke yourselves inside-out!”

  “You assassins go assassinate somebody, or whatever it is you do!” the Guild mechanic said, who was a pale-skinned man from the Far North. “We know what’s in the fuel spirits better’n you do!”

  The Lead Assassin sauntered back over to A’Nu-Ahki and his men, and hoisted his pack as he passed. “Come ‘long, Jek. We gotta get over these mountains by second night fall.”

  “What’s that thing you hid in the bushes?” Nu asked, as he tightened his straps. He hadn’t cared enough before to inquire about the other three.

  “Oracle translator.”

  The words were gibberish to A’Nu-Ahki. Normally an oracle was a person that spoke for the gods, not a crystalline pyramid. “What’s it do?”

  The Assassin smiled with tolerant superiority. “It takes vibrations in the spirit realm, charms them, and grows them up so they can cross the Gihunu Valley. That way, our oracle priests can hear the spirits that carry the voices of our operatives through the oracles from Assuri.”

  Nu was not sure he wanted to know anything further. His father had mentioned that Tubaal-qayin’s Guild had machines that could project sound over great distances. What that had to do with using “spirits” to carry voices was not something Nu understood. He sensed that he would get little useful information from the Assassin on the subject anyway.

  All the assassins were of either Kushtim descent or refugees from the fallen Orthodox Setiim City-State of Ayarak—
red-tan men who could easily affect a West Coastal Assurim accent. The speech of Salaam-Surupag was closer to the classical dialect of Sa-utar, though Nu’s complexion also blended well enough, if he didn’t talk too much. There was only one person he was required to speak to anyway and she was still a long way off.

  The pass proved an easier hike than it looked. The trail at the head of the gorge climbed up onto a series of switchbacks over a relatively smooth grass and brush-covered hump wedged diagonally between two larger mountains. Nu’s spirits raised some as he walked off the torpor from the long jungle ride. Behind him, two of the assassins carefully brushed their tracks clean with small branches to erase evidence of their passage.

  Near midnight, they came upon another giant paint splat dropped on the trail like a turd from some huge gryphon. It glowed faintly in the dark.

  “Must be a phosphorus mix,” Nu said, as he stooped to examine it.

  The Lead Assassin said, “Let’s get some dirt over it.”

  They took a half hour to scoop and smooth some course sand and gravel over the orange glow-slime, though the rocky terrain made it harder to get good cover soil. The assassins then took another ten minutes to make sure the clean-up job would look natural from the air—a hard thing to be absolutely sure of in the dark.

  They made good distance, almost to the top of the pass, before the pre-dawn light creased the eastern horizon atop the highest ridges. The assassins found a box canyon with some overhanging shelf rock on either side, where they turned in to hole up for the day. By the time Nu heard the rattling hum of a Samyaza gas bag struggle over the pass, the hikers were already reclined in the shadow of a large outcropping and almost asleep.

  It did not bode well for his slumber to hear a second, third, and fourth airship rattle by in line after the first.

  T

  he sun-infused lacquered sail cloth of the lead airship turned Sub-Altern Inguska’s world into solid gold. They had the squadron commander aboard. If all went well today, a promotion for the young Demigod officer might well result. All he had to do was stay sharp and pick up the trail as he had done yesterday.

  “There’s the last marker we dropped as we went over the pass,” Inguska said, pointing to an orange spot on the rocky ridge below.

  “Adjusting course to two-nine-seven degrees; decreasing altitude by four hundred cubits,” the pilot responded, as he glanced at some notes he had made the evening before.

  Their commander stood out on the observation platform silently with Inguska and let the two Demigods do their job.

  “I see the next one!”

  “New course, three-one-four; leveling off.”

  They flew for several more minutes over a series of smaller ridges.

  Inguska frantically swept the rills and gullies for signs of their next marker. “We should be over it by now, but I don’t see anything!”

  The pilot said, “Maybe it landed in a shaded crevasse. I’ll lose some more altitude.”

  Inguska tried not to let his growing apprehension show. He had divine blood in him, after all—on his father’s side—the Demigods accepted nothing less. Anxiety was a beggarly earthbound trait.

  The Commander simply watched him with impassive eyes.

  Inguska shouted, “It’s been too long. Make the next course change!”

  “Coming to two-eight-two, decreasing altitude by another hundred cubits,” said the pilot.

  For another fifteen minutes, they flew on with no sign of any further marker spots.

  Inguska tried to fight down his growing panic. “I don’t understand; the markers should be here!”

  “Maybe some of the bladders didn’t break,” the pilot said. “It’s been known to happen.”

  “No! I saw every one of them burst! Somebody cleaned them away!”

  Finally the Squadron Commander spoke. “Don’t feel too bad, Sub-Altern. You’ve done well. I’ll order the other airships to fan out from here. It was probably just a long-range recon team looking for an easy route into our heartland. They’ll see it’s impossible and turn back. Either way, I’ll be able to make my case to Command that we strengthen the mountain passes.”

  While that took some pressure off Inguska, he was still troubled. “My Lord, what if they’re spies? They’ll creep over the pass, hire on at some rubber plantation for a year or so, and then migrate south to Assur’Ayur or Meldur with the season. Then they’ll disappear!”

  The Commander nodded. “An astute observation, Sub-Altern. I’ll notify the local sovereign and have him increase security. In the mean time, I’ll double the air patrols in this vicinity.”

  T

  he other side of the range looked almost identical to the misty low land jungle of the Gihunu Valley in the sunset reds, except that the chimney smoke of hidden arboreal platform homes curled up from several points on the horizon. The forests on this side of the mountains were cultivated with rubber, sugar cane, and timber, the plantationers of which had such a superstitious dread of the Haunted Lands that most probably did not even know that the pass used by Tubaal-qayin’s insertion team even existed.

  Not so the increased aerial patrols.

  While the airships were easy to avoid for the assassin team crossing the mountains, Nu grew increasingly concerned for the Firedrake camp.

  “That’s my only ride out of here when this is over!” A’Nu-Ahki said to the Lead Assassin while they trekked down the last of the foothills toward the deeper shadow of the woodland eaves.

  “Keep it low, Jek. The Guildies know how to hide and stay put. For the gas baggers it’ll be like trying to find a little green flag on a dark pole in the Great Dragonwood of the west.”

  “So you’re not concerned at all?”

  The Lead Assassin turned and stopped, so that Nu bumped right into his chest in the dark. “Listen Jek, I done this pass ten times since the war started. The first four were without Firedrakes. Half the men that came with me back then ended up as wurm bait! Don’t tell me how to do my job! Yeah, our odds got worse when the gas bags increased their patrols. They got worse—not impossible. They can’t know where we’re going and who we’re gonna meet. So keep yer head and don’t turn into an old woman on me!”

  Nu took a diplomatic step backward, glad the night concealed the humiliation in his eyes. He kept silent the rest of the way down.

  After about an hour, they came to a little-used road that wound up into the foothills farther to the north. There the assassins halted.

  Nu said, “Is this the place?”

  The Lead Assassin pulled a small mechanical time piece from his belt and looked up at the stars. “He’ll be along soon.”

  About five minutes later, they heard the clop and rattle of an onager-drawn cart ambling up the hill from the south. The other assassins pulled A’Nu-Ahki into the brush while their leader remained at the roadside. The cart crested the gentle slope just as the moon began to rise. Nu had just enough light to make out the onager as it drew to a stop.

  A basso voice came from the cart, “Wandering the hills under the stars is tonic to the soul like the wine of the gods, is it not, my friend?”

  “I prefer the moonlit ocean,” answered the Lead Assassin.

  The others stepped out into the open, and drew Nu along with them.

  The fellow on the cart lit a small lantern that hung on a post behind the driver’s seat. He jumped down to greet the Lead Assassin with a cordial bow. Nu had never seen a fatter man that could still stand up and mount a drawn cart.

  “Call me Telemnuk, gentlemen. Pile you into my cart, and dine with me tonight at my manor. I’ve just hired some cargo teamsters, and they look hungry from their long journeys.”

  None of the assassins said anything as they climbed into the cart, which Nu found uncivil in the face of such courtesy.

  “Thank you. My name is A’Nu-Ahki,” Nu said as he passed the driver and pulled himself in behind the others.

  The ride along the woodland trail to Telemnuk’s home took less than an ho
ur. A’Nu-Ahki saw the window lights through the thickening trees long before the cart pulled up to the mansion’s ladder-base. The stairway spiraled up the trunk of a giant cedar to the first platform of a veritable palace, larger even than Urugim’s old tree-home outside Sa-utar.

  Telemnuk called to his servants as he passed through the main entrance to the house’s first level. “I have met the cargo masters I said would arrive tonight!”

  Within a large triangular dining hall braced between the trunks of three equal-sized conifers lay a semi-circular banquet table that partly surrounded a huge central hearth. Their host invited them to eat, and had his servants pour out large goblets of a pungent red wine.

  The assassins mostly ate in silence, so A’Nu-Ahki found himself doing most of the talking when Telemnuk attempted to make casual conversation around the table. Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi had made it clear what Nu could and could not discuss, and so had the Lead Assassin during the long ride through the jungle and up on the pass. Their host never ventured into forbidden territory, and Nu found himself rather enjoying his company.

  The only time the assassins interacted much with their contact was when Telemnuk dismissed his servants and briefed them on the following day’s activities.

  “I have a shipment of raw rubber for processing at our plant about a day’s ride east of here. With the proceeds, you must purchase a load of earthenware at the junction town two days more down the Forest Road—you can’t miss it. You will carry the shipment of earthenware south from there to Meldur, to a market place at the address on this slip of papyrus.”