Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  A’Nu-Ahki snorted. “Oh great, you mean you’re making me go up there alone with him!”

  “A little suffering makes the heart tough.”

  “Then why is that only Pahpi is such hardened steel?”

  They both laughed.

  “Day is done,” Lumekki said, once levity subsided to wistful sighs.

  “Yeah, I’d better get down and see how ‘Miha did in town. Market days are still tough on her. I keep offering to go with her, but… you know.”

  “By Under-world, it’s been two hundred years! After all she did for them during the firestorms, are they really still that petty?”

  Nu said, “More so, though they may not be as vocal about it since Pahpi closed down that rogue printing press.”

  They took the ziggurat stairs down to the back courtyard.

  “Well, give her my love,” said the Old Soldier.

  They entered the back gate. Lumekki turned for his chamber overlooking the ramparts. A’Nu-Ahki climbed the cut-log stairs to the loft apartment he and his wife shared over the library.

  As he opened the door, the sound of suddenly stifled weeping met him from the darkened interior.

  “‘Miha?”

  “Uh, hi Nu.” She sniffed, trying to mask that she’d been crying.

  “What happened?”

  He popped a spark pellet into the oil lantern by the door, and illuminated the interior. Her eyes were red and wet.

  “I thought it was over.” She slumped back onto their bed. “I really imagined that after all this time I had gained some measure… I mean, nobody has said much to me for years. But I guess things don’t work that way around here.”

  “What’d they say this time?”

  “Tarkuni’s widow caught me at the market and ‘warned me by the prophetic spirit’ that the reason we have no children is because our marriage is cursed and that I’m barren! Why do they still hate me?”

  “Wish I knew. Old prejudices die hard, I guess. Maybe we represent something they fear deep inside.”

  Sitting down by her on the divan, he cradled her in his arms.

  “They’re not the people I thought they would be back in Bab’Tubila. I mean, I expected you all to be stern, but not so mean-spirited!”

  “They’re not the same people I once thought either,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’m sorry that peace still eludes you.”

  “No it doesn’t. Not as long as I have you. Until I met you, I never dreamed a man’s touch could do anything but make me recoil!”

  He kissed her forehead, shamed that for him the feelings always paled when compared to memories of another. Still, he was glad she said it. It meant he was doing his job. That was no small thing these days. Most men—even in the Seer Clan—didn’t.

  He had been married to Emza two hundred years and now another two hundred to Na’Amiha. He understood that the relationship was supposed to mature over time—consciously walked himself through the same internal speeches almost daily. He accepted that passion faded as it properly grew into something better—compassion. The alchemy of attraction was supposed to change over the decades. Yet here that alchemy had been artificial from the start. The truth is, you gave yourself credit for deeper maturity and love than you actually possessed, and now you feel cheated!

  He blocked that little revelation from his mind and changed the subject. “I’m still a bit of a slob though, aren’t I?”

  “True.” She laughed through her tears. “But I can train a slob, given another century or so.” Then her pale face sank again, as she changed the subject back. “Nu, what if I really am sterile? I’m getting up there in years. Maybe you should take another wife or a concubine.”

  “You’re just having a long rest cycle. We hardly were together enough during the first few decades for you to conceive. By the time we became accustomed to each other your rest cycle had come—that’s all it is.”

  “For two hundred years? First, I’m frigid, now I’m sterile! I’m not getting any younger! Maybe another wife is needed.”

  He wanted to shout, I heard you the first time! Instead, he held his tongue—like always. Her “panicky voice” was always worst whenever she discussed children. It was getting much harder these days to say the right thing always.

  He said, “Double rest cycles are common. Besides, you got over the first obstacle and then some.” He smiled in a way that he hoped she would find endearing. “The second will take care of itself in E’Yahavah’s time. Iyared’s prophecy is specific and the Seer Clan does not practice polygamy.”

  She screeched, “Why not? Everybody else does it—even at Sa-utar! What good is being a stickler about this?”

  Nu answered her quietly, “It was not so in the beginning.”

  She turned her face from him. “You’d know. You’re the seer!”

  “Speaking of that, will you be alright while I’m gone?” As badly as he wanted a subject change, Nu immediately regretted saying this. He just did not realize how petty it sounded until the words were already out.

  Her shoulders slouched again. “Oh—that’s right, soon you leave up the mountain. It seems like you jump at opportunities to leave these days!”

  “It’s not like I’m eager to be alone up there with Pahpi!”

  She gave a resigned laugh—as mirthless as Lumekki’s had been. “You two wouldn’t know what to do without each other.”

  “I know what I’d do!”

  “What?”

  The words came to his lips with desperation of their own, his true source of which he hoped she would never know: “Sleep in more and let you tell me what a good husband I am anyway?”

  He felt her mood shift so suddenly it moved the very air in the room. She turned to him again, the life in her green eyes rekindled. Her lips puckered with vampish glee—an overdone expression Nu found even remotely attractive only through much effort.

  “Of course,” she added, “I’d be ‘sleeping in’ with you, and you’d be getting more rest if you’d gotten up and gone to work for the Old Man!”

  And that, too, was how things always seemed to never quite end with Na’Amiha.

  N

  u was strapping the wood bundles for the burnt offering to the pack-beast when word came in.

  Lumekki ran to him from the monastery gates, out of breath. “I just came from the drone field oracle! It’s happened! Meldur fell three days ago! Samyaza has surrendered on Lumekkor’s terms to prevent a siege and further naval bombardment of Assur’Ayur.”

  Nu grabbed his father’s shoulders and almost shook him. “Is there any word on the women?”

  “Name lists are in for both Meldur and Assur’Ayur.”

  “And?”

  Lumekki’s eyes lost some of their eagerness. “There was a lot of covert warfare inside Meldur, sabotage, and assassin’s work. The enemy compromised your network before the end. Many of our women there were implicated and executed before the city fell…”

  Nu demanded, “Biriya?”

  “I checked. Her name was not on the list of survivors.”

  “What about Assur’Ayur?”

  “Uranna and Tylurnis are listed with ten others as missing and presumed dead. Conflicting accounts place them at a special school for palace concubines, location unknown. The Dumuzi is looking into it. He thinks there’s something odd about it…”

  Nu shoved the last armload of wood he had just laid on the pack-beast to the ground. The animal snorted uneasily, and snapped its beak. “This prophecy you spoke over me in my cradle is a bloody curse! You and Pahpi should never have shut down that rogue press! What comfort am I? Each test, I somehow fail! You said that I would ‘Comfort you all concerning the elements E’Yahavah has cursed!’ What does that even mean?”

  The outburst hit his father like a fist. Lumekki’s eyes dropped to the ground—a look Nu had seen once before, long ago.

  A’Nu-Ahki wanted to die. “Pahpo, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have said that! I didn’t mean…”

  Lumekk
i shrugged. “It’s alright, Son. You think of those women far away and grieve that you could not save them. But I’m the one who sent them out that gate. I’m the one who really failed them. It’s not your job to clean up after my messes.”

  Nu shriveled up inside as his father’s old wound ripped wide open and bled anew all over them both.

  T

  he burnt offering torched up the satiny night like flickering light on jagged stones; dancing serpents from an Under-world phantasm. Fatty brown smoke billowed into absorbing darkness, fragrant incense in the megalithic natural temple that crowned Mount N’Zar. Residual heat from the day’s sun made the air balmy, causing A’Nu-Ahki and Muhet’Usalaq to pant. They knelt coated in sweat and cinders with dark bloodstains on their bared chests and arms; flaked remnants of a life spilled out.

  The old Zaqen seemed deep in prayer, erect on his kneecaps before the crude altar. Nu wobbled in roughly the same position, and wondered guiltily how long this ordeal would last, or if he would pass out first. He half hoped for the latter. Nobody could drag out a sacrifice like Muhet’Usalaq.

  The barren mountaintop gave new meaning to fasting and self-affliction. With the sacrificial ram nearly consumed, the acrid smell of burnt flesh and hair caked its bitter resin in A’Nu-Ahki’s nostrils. Any sense of ritual cleansing had long ago crumbled away into an angry endurance test between generations.

  The flames began to die. Nu rose from his aching knees to gaze at the sky. He wondered what Q’Enukki had ever seen in this place. Is there something I’m missing? Or is Pahpi just imitating some nostalgic memory of his father?

  Heat, dehydration, and exhaustion had long ago diverted them from the question that had brought them to the summit to begin with. Nu moved away from the altar, and reclined on a nearby flat rock. If all this is to weaken my fleshly appetites, then consider them about to drop!

  Silence.

  Nu flipped over onto his stomach. How can I be a seer—much less the Comforter from A’Nu—if I can’t even handle fasting and meditation? What good is all this if we just see heat phantoms up here?

  He turned onto his back again and looked to heaven for an answer.

  The silent stars flickered. If they smiled down on him, it was with the tight-lipped smirk of the Sphinx on Aeden’s Pass.

  The cooling of the night sky caused a gentle breeze to filter up from the more temperate ravines below. Above him, the wandering planets slowly followed their courses in the First Heaven. They were in a rare alignment that made them all visible. Dim Qayin flew outermost—offset beyond the circle of his father—alienated. Usually only observable by telescope, Nu knew where and how hard to look for its barely visible pin prick. Glare from the majestic giants almost made it impossible.

  The brighter largest planets—Atum-Ra Archronos; Primeval Father, with his golden ring of kingship; and Mother Khuva, ever great with the children of the world—approached to kiss each other and double their already formidable light. Closer in swam blue Tiamatu, the Leviathan of Chaos, purveyor of disorder, and symbol of evil for the sons of Seti. For those civilizations descended from Qayin, however, Tiamatu had become the star of hidden wisdom in new pantheons dedicated to the fallen Watchers.

  Nearer still to Earth, red L’Mekku—warrior planet, and Tiamatu’s pawn—taunted kings toward madness and bloodshed. Low on the opposite horizon, closest of all, with its days rotating in reverse to the spin of the rest of the rebel cosmos, golden Seti flickered—the evening and morning star. Last and smallest, Lilitua danced as the Lost Daughter returned.

  Brighter than all of them, low on the southern horizon, the blue-violet comet covered half the sky as a white-hot blade to excise and cauterize the Earth’s putrefying gangrene.

  Nu rolled onto his side and glanced back at the altar. Muhet’Usalaq lay face down, hands outstretched, by now probably asleep. The sacrificial fire had died to embers. Patriarchal respect or no, Nu had had enough. He got up from the slab, and went to wake him.

  Muhet’Usalaq instantly shot up erect and shouted, “Great E’Yahavah, I am old and white of hair! The end of all things approaches quickly and we do not know what you want us to do!”

  Nu jumped back and almost screamed at him, certain the old die-hard had simply awakened to the sound of his steps. Shamed by his own irritability, A’Nu-Ahki remembered why they had come up there, indeed, why they had come to Akh’Uzan in the first place, and what they desperately needed to move forward.

  He knelt down by his grandfather and cried out, “The sons of Seti have shut their eyes against the Obelisks of Fire and Water! The Seer Clan forsakes love and truth for fanaticism about ritual, prophetic speculation, and bloodline! Merciful E’Yahavah, forgive us! I know we haven’t walked as closely to you as we could have, but please guide us anyway, as you once spoke plainly to Q’Enukki. Do this for your own honor’s sake, if nothing else. You’ve given us the treasury of Paru’Ainu to prepare for the last days, but how can we plan wisely if we do not know precisely what to plan for?”

  The breeze gusted slightly.

  Nu crumpled, face to the dust, under the weighty commitment he had just affirmed. It terrified him that he still felt so fed up and close to quitting. He feared that if something did not happen that night, he would go down from N’Zar, down from Akh’Uzan, leave, and never come back. He didn’t want to feel this way, but he did, and he no longer had the willpower to fight it off anymore. If something did not change, this was it.

  Muhet’Usalaq’s intonation rang like that of some annoying old mystic from a theatrical satire, “We need to wait.”

  “Here?”

  The Old Man ignored him and returned to his silent prayer.

  Nu resumed his stargazing, silently calling out to his Maker.

  Because the comet was low to the south, most of the constellations stood out fairly well, their cosmic drama displayed in seasonal signs for the children of Atum-Ra. The brighter stars had one or two pinkish-orange, violet, or gold halos that sometimes represented heads, eyes, or other main attributes of central characters in the heavenly stories. Mostly, the key to interpreting the signs depended more on the names of the stars themselves than on the patterns they formed.

  The Virgin, still far off at that time of year, held her sheaf—the Woman’s Seed who would deliver creation from the Curse of death and decay. Her minor constellation, The Desired One, depicted her after the holy child’s birth, as a mother with her son on her lap.

  Nu whispered low enough that Muhet’Usalaq could not hear him, “Please restore my desire, E’Yahavah. I have nothing left…”

  Losing prominence on the ecliptic, the Ram constellation spoke of sacrifices by which corrupt humanity may approach E’Yahavah’s holiness through the blood of innocent animal substitutes to pay for their sin…

  A’Nu-Ahki amended himself. “I have nothing but the Ram…”

  He saw the Dragon Breaker, which pictured the Promised Seed as the ultimate monster-slayer. The Comet had come from this constellation to crush the head of the southern Sea Leviathan—but not of the Basilisk constellation, as must ultimately happen before final restoration could come.

  A’Nu-Ahki spoke to Muhet’Usalaq, “Have you considered how the comet crushes Leviathan’s head, but not the Basilisk?”

  “So? The two are just different aspects of the same thing.”

  “They are both rebels, yes, but are they necessarily one and the same completely? I don’t think so.”

  “Leviathan is the Basilisk’s vassal technically.”

  “I think we need to be technical,” Nu said. “The comet’s path clearly suggests World-end, but not the immediate crushing of the Basilisk’s headship. The fact that Leviathan is a sea monster might indicate the first World-end will be the destruction of water spoken of by Seti’s Obelisks. I figure the World-end of fire would require a sign dominant in the Fire River constellation. Yet part of the Fire River overlaps the forward fins of Leviathan, near its head, which could mean that both World-ends will be almost
contemporaneous and work in conjunction with each other.”

  “That is not the traditional understanding.”

  A’Nu-Ahki was just glad to get the Old Man talking. “Maybe each World-end will carry within itself a little of the other—the water having with it some of the fire and the fire being accompanied by disturbances at sea.”

  He knew his speculation stemmed not from any direct revelation, merely from his own knowledge of the Star Sign Tablets. Yet it made sense and was consistent with what those tablets revealed. Nor did Nu demand that it be anything more than a speculation; he just wanted to engage the Old Man.

  Muhet’Usalaq remained silent.

  Nu said, “Seti’s revelations explaining the signs of heaven from the Cosmic Dynasty Stele of Aeden provide us the basis of a code. The stele told how the stars made during the fourth day of creation would be ‘for signs and for seasons.’ Tracking seasons was just a matter of observation. Signs required a symbol key from the One who had set them there. Seeking that key was Seti’s life work, which he passed on to Q’Enukki to give us the basis for our theology and cosmology. Both seers centered their focus on the Woman’s Seed and the Two World-ends. I’ve suggested nothing that violates any of that.”

  Muhet’Usalaq glared up at him side-ways. “The art of interpreting cosmic changes in the signs, such as the appearance of comets, supernovae, or new wandering stars, demands an objective and honest heart and a thorough knowledge of the heavenly cycle and its revealed meanings. Even with your insights—if insights they are—we are no farther along in our quest for understanding than before: Destruction of some sort approaches the Earth because of growing evil. It will fall when I die. Does the comet indicate the nearness of my death? If so, near in terms of what measure—a century, decades, years, months, weeks—hopefully not days?”

  “I still read it as a World-end of water,” Nu said, hoping to draw his grandfather to a conclusion—even a contrary one.

  “Perhaps, though older sages thought the fire purge came first.”