The ideogram for Men Calling on the Divine Name shone in fiery gold across the front of the holy man’s wedge-shaped nemes headdress-mask. Another flock of children knelt before him with terrified eyes locked on his feet. A statue of the Basilisk serpent coiled around the altar’s base.
The Priest chanted, “E’Yahavah speaks only to the Watchers. The Watchers speak only to me. Men are not worthy to walk with E’Yahavah. You cannot understand the words of the Fathers without me, for they are mystery words, which often do not really mean what they appear to say.”
“Come,” said the glass Watcher, who pulled A’Nu-Ahki away from the sacrifice and guided him down the stairs of the Altar Tower with its worm-neck writhing inside the wall. Nu wondered what would happen if he slipped his utility knife between the blocks to sever the twisted thing.
This time they descended past the courtyard, into dungeons in the tower’s lower parts, deep in the bowels of the earth where dim red light refracted upward from burning rivers of magma. Here the crawling shadows were darkest. Nu trembled as they approached the lowest chamber, nearest the body of the bloated Hydra in the foundations. The stench of maggot-ridden carcasses filled the air, like leavings from some great hunting wurm.
Crowded around the deepest portal, a throng of pale children peered in at the warm sticky darkness. Nu recognized them as the same group that had played and danced when he had first entered the fortress.
The Watcher nudged him through the tiny mob to the open door.
Inside the cell, on a lavish bed lit by dragon-headed wall sconces on either side that vomited lava into sloping sluiceways, snaked another worm-head—this one buried in the body of a Temple prostitute with face painted so thickly that Nu had doubts as to her true gender. She beckoned two callers who stood on either side of her divan, silhouetted by the molten streamlets from the two sconce mouths.
The first bore the crown of Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi, the little goat Shepherd-Emperor of Lumekkor. The second wore the red robes of Ayar Adi’In’s alchemist priesthood in apostate Khavilakki.
The pale children watched from the door with wide prurient eyes. Some giggled their innocence away with monkey laughter, while others cried in confusion, shame, and fright.
Nu pried his eyes from the lurid spectacle and turned to usher the youngsters away as fast as he could. His muscles became cold honey—too slow—always too slow. By the time he had fully turned, the children already imitated what they saw in the chamber amongst themselves. Nu tried to shut the door, but it would not budge.
Small sores and bruises began to form on the children through their awkward, disease-filled play.
Nu cried to the Watcher, “Make them stop!”
“I cannot.”
“Then tell me what this means!”
The messenger put a luminous hand on A’Nu-Ahki’s shoulder and pulled him away from the door and the mimicking rot-children.
“This is the heart of Atum-Ra’s house, where the Basilisk seduces the mighty among men and gives power to those who sink into his bed of religious, economic, and political intrigue. It all starts in the heart. The children see a distorted vision of what they think is life and grow dissatisfied with the reality of their own lot—even the princes and priests.”
Nu said under his breath, “Especially the princes and priests.”
“Especially them,” the Watcher agreed. “They are made greedy for the delights of the whore—delights that not even her lovers truly experience. They are always enticed, but never satisfied.”
“And what is the significance of her two lovers?”
“They bring the illusion of life to the Basilisk’s manipulation in front of the children. The technocratic Guild of Tubaal-qayin does so by using their Divinely-given gifts to invent great engineering works of metal and quickfire, which they ungratefully set up as proof to the masses that men have unlocked the secrets of Divinity to overcome the hardship of working the soil that E’Yahavah has cursed. Yet their escape is a delusion. Even in the Guild’s most powerful art, the frustration of the Great Curse only changes form to multiply in new and unexpected ways.
“The second lover wears the red robes of the priesthood of Ardis and Ayar Adi’In. Guided by dark Watchers, they study the creation codes of life, altering information processed in the tiniest structures of the body. They want to engineer a counterfeit Seed of Promise. Instead, the priestly research corrupts the integrity of all flesh, accelerating breakdown in the replication language used inside all life in ways not even the Watchers can predict.”
Nu’s guide lifted his hand to heaven. In a flash of light, they stood before the Great Temple at Ayar Adi’In—a massive granite complex that continually hummed with mysterious engines and flickered in exotic quickfire ghost-light. Only instead of standing on the terraced flower-garden hill of Adi’In, this version of the temple pressed down on a bloody mountain of the dead and dying carcasses of millions of squirming, malformed babies, each experimented upon, harvested for tissue, and left to die.
The Watcher blinked and another flash of light returned them to the tower courtyard of Atum-Ra’s fortress-house, which now seemed dilapidated, and stank of decay.
“Who exactly are the pale children?” Nu asked, saving this question for last because he feared its answer most. For he already knew the truth.
The Messenger said nothing. He merely spread his arms toward the people in the courtyard, as if to indicate that all, at one time or another, had lurked at the door of the Whore’s chamber.
Nu saw the same wedding again that he had seen when they had first entered the tower gates. He followed the couple through their life together. Before long, the man berated his wife when she failed to give him the impossible pleasures that his spying on the Whore’s divan had conditioned him to expect. Then the woman wept when her husband no longer praised her with the lofty words of the Great Sage in the upper hall of colored lights that smelled like the mummified dead.
However, Nu heard her whispers in the night—how she too yearned for her own version of the lower chamber—where she could be in control of herself and her man, through the exquisite mastery with which the Whore dominated her lovers by promises of pleasure and pain.
The home of this married couple existed inside one of the kapar blocks of the six-sided fortress. Inside each block lived men and their wives—with lots of children—more each year. These youngsters saw anger, and grew up angry. They knew self-involved parents, and became self-involved. Left to themselves, they drifted with their own affections like falling meteors—not human affections as created in the beginning, but contorted by the grip of the all-encompassing Curse—children born into a continuum they had not caused, but which they could still partly shape and which would wholly shape them unless they fought against its pull.
Bored, under-supervised, they explored the lower chambers seeking excitement and a place to belong. Once they saw the lava-lit dungeon secrets however, nothing could ever seem quite as exciting as the Whore did.
Thus, the cycle repeated, each time weakening the stones of the individual home-bricks a little more. Nu saw the stone house of his married couple crumble with a loud pop. Two more blocks caved in on its space. The odd-shaped skulls from the two great piles, used as bricks in various places to rebuild, added to this unstable distribution of stress. The collapse of their home crushed and bruised the children, while the man and woman went their separate ways from the rubble, dragging their sons and daughters apart from each other with them.
The surrounding house-bricks groaned under the growing maldistribution of pressure. Several more collapsed. Meanwhile, the sores and wounds began to fester, which the children received from the collapse of their homes or from playing in the lower chambers near the Whore. The tower’s wise men placed tiny linen bandages over their unwashed ulcers.
By now, the exponential increase of broken stones became so disruptive that they threatened make the entire fortress implode. Towers wobbled, while the outer walls buckled in
swaying pandemonium. A corrosive filth foamed up from the lower chambers, rotting the foundations with acid stench.
When people could deny the obvious instability no longer, the children, the wise men, and the parents climbed in panic to the Sage in his hall of lights. He reeked of mummy dust. They asked him to teach them how they might save the tower.
The Sage replied, “Only the woman at the foundations can give you the answers you seek.” He carefully refrained from calling her a whore.
Nu watched the tower people race down the spiraling steps to the lower chamber, wading through the filth as it ate at their clothes and skin. The Whore and her two lovers waited with open arms, as if miraculously untouched by all the rottenness, all too happy to help.
“The tower crumbles because it has too many stones,” the Whore said. “Give me your children. I will teach them how to control the process so the structure does not fall.” She then gave a detailed lesson on the building’s architecture that left everyone convinced she was a master builder.
The parents gave up their children and went to the markets to work or to stone homes to amuse themselves while they waited.
The Whore shrieked, “The dance shall liberate your spirits!” while she put whips into the hands of the youngsters and told them to dance as they had always danced in the courtyard. She supplied a symphony of pipers, lyre players, drummers, and singers that began to play a form of music Nu had never heard before. Loud and cacophonous, yet powerful and moving, the instruments wailed in twisted cycles of sound.
At first, the children seemed confused and unwilling to move with it. As time passed, the harmonics intoxicated their senses until its drumbeat slowly captured their hearts and bodies. As they started to jump to the chaotic new tune, the Whore began to suggest different steps to them.
Most of the children followed her directions, though many found her suggestions revolting—obscene contortions of orgiastic rhythmic mayhem. The most willing dancers caught on and used their whips against those slower to comply.
Soon, the play-dancing became a convulsion of leaping shrieking bodies, flogging each other to faster undulations, boys against girls, women against men. The whip-dancers enjoyed tormenting the opposite gender and even gave themselves over to punishment at the hands of other floggers. Growing numbers of dancers avoided the opposite sex, as if fearful of the rejection they could devise so well, or of other pains less obvious but more devastating. Yet the thrill rapidly wore off even for those who enjoyed it. Despair and exhaustion eventually set in for everyone alike, though some were better at faking a smile than others.
Some men turned to other men, and women to other women in their gyrations, drawn increasingly to their own gender until nothing else satisfied. Impulse and chaos ruled, choking out conscience and self-evident human design. Putting the wounds and decay for the design, these couples made desperate attempts to find love and acceptance from the Dance, but confused what they sought with the manipulative fire of the Whore’s chamber. A few even paired off to leave the festivities and find shelter amid shards of the broken building blocks. Tired from the competition and pain, they tried to recapture some of the security of a stable brick-home. Yet all they had were broken pieces and dust.
The tired couples built shanties from the debris and tried to pretend that what they had found was better than what they had lost through the Dance. Many could not keep up the illusion, however. Nu watched as these climbed the swaying towers and jumped off. Most of the others gave up and went back to the Dance. They tried to convince themselves that maybe they would do better with their next dance partners.
The tempo grew as the dancers murdered, raped, and stole from each other to get what they now believed was their due. Some dragged away the smallest children in the secrecy of night, casting the finger of blame at E’Yahavah for the out-of-control desires that raged within them to dominate the Dance. Nu saw the whole process—how the drives and compulsions had arisen from the mind-bending poison of their untreated wounds and from the lies that the children had been conditioned to believe about themselves by the Whore. She told them they had no real choice against the Dance.
Even now, the healers and priests who helped the Whore to supervise the dance left the dancer’s ulcers to fester beneath linen patches and caked cosmetics.
“What can be done?” They all shrugged. “Has not E’Yahavah created you with these desires?” They told the dancers. “These wounds are simply a part of life. Drink some wine and opium. Do you see any that can truly avoid the dance? How can such a common thing be unnatural?”
When all this failed to keep the fortress stable and only made its collapse imminent, the Basilisk himself appeared again as a messenger of light from the upper chamber to reveal his ultimate answer.
The Basilisk Sage called down from the center tower’s balcony, “You can create new realities for yourselves; there are no absolute rules for how to do this!”
Nobody seemed to notice that the claim that “there are no absolute rules” was itself the most tyrannical of absolute rules. As far as Nu had seen, it forced everyone to pay the self-destructive price of denying reality for madness. As civilization collapsed around them, the city dwellers merely looked bewildered.
The Watcher said to Nu, “Come with me to the heaven of heavens.”
Immediately they stood before a throne of blazing light so bright, that it rippled the very space around it and blasted things away from itself like a wind. A’Nu-Ahki recognized it from a description in Q’Enukki’s Fifth Scroll in the split second before he averted his eyes from the throne’s brilliance. Winged Kherubar crouched on either side of the dais; leonine bodies of white-hot flame poised like sentries with heads bowed in respect. Colors of a new primary kind, which no human eyes had ever seen before, arced around the throne like ribbons of sunlight in a bright mist. Thunder rumbled overhead, as dark clouds overshadowed the chair like an awning.
The light itself howled in Nu’s ears until he shook violently. He shielded his eyes from the flash-vision and would have fallen to the crystalline floor in a stupor had not the Watcher held him upright and told him to observe.
A’Nu-Ahki knew that the will of the One on the throne held together the very particles and energies of the universe. Even in that piercing glare, the power must have been shaded down so as not to consume lesser creatures. None could approach closer than the cloud awning, nor look directly upon the seated form. Nu felt his presence more than saw him, though he could observe the base of the throne in quick blinding glances if he tried hard.
Burned and seeing spots, Nu’s eyes followed the floor away from the dais to a large group of three-toed feet nearby. He slowly peered up and found they belonged to an assembly of coldly luminous man-like beings with immense, hairless heads and black almond-shaped eyes. They stood before the throne at a discreet distance, as if they desired an audience with the One who sat there, but feared to come too close.
The tallest and brightest of this multitude stepped forward; although their brilliance seemed a dirty gray compared to the light blazing from between the Sphinx-like Kherubar. Their faces were not human and seemed ill equipped to convey human emotion. Yet they felt emotions at least akin to those of humanity and Nu found that he could somehow read them through what otherwise would have been almost nondescript features.
The first gray creature leaped forward to bow before the throne in an overdone gesture of obeisance. Soft tendrils grew from his head like a small living crown, whipping in the blast of the Light. His white-less eyes blinked with black heat, as the fire of a once grand purpose burned over his face like a poorly hung mask. Zeal radiated from his every gesture, projecting words, images, and emotions into Nu’s mind in a disturbing montage of violent color.
The second gray creature had no tendrils on his head. A restlessly calculating super-intelligence glowered from his eyes, cold and heartless as the Abyss. A fading vapor of good intentions hung around him also like the dead phosphor-glow of his skin or t
he sickly-sweet aroma of succulent fruit gone rotten. Nu sensed this person had an agenda so all-important and all-consuming to him that he had sacrificed things one should never sacrifice. For all the power hanging like a glimmering shroud around the second creature, the image that stuck in Nu’s mind was that of a stubborn angry goat.
This scene also sprang from the Fifth Scroll of Q’Enukki: The two gray man-creatures who stepped forward to address the throne were Samyaza and Uzaaz’El. Their cabal of Watchers petitioned E’Yahavah for permission to go to Earth.
Samyaza thought-projected an impassioned plea though his mouth never moved; “Please, O great, resplendent, and Holy One”—his words had a hungry whine in them—“allow us to redeem the sons of men! For no woman’s seed has been born to them and we have heard nothing in all the heavens about when or how this should happen. Could it not be that you have ordained for us, your created sons, to achieve it? Let us go and you shall see how we will hallow you!”
The One on the throne regarded the assembly with the deliberation of a judge rather than a father. His voice came low and penetrated through the crystal floor up into Nu’s body; felt in his bones rather than heard. “My Spirit will not always struggle with men because they are also of flesh. Yet you wish to mingle yourselves with them? The day you set foot on Earth, you will be enticed by the daughters of men, to take them to yourselves according to strange attractions for which neither you nor they are designed. Your rationalizations are elaborate, but I see you.”
The second Watcher, Uzaaz’El, spoke with calculated restraint, using his narrow mouth. “Master, it is by our joining with Atum’s daughters that the effect of death in humanity shall, in slow stages, be overcome. Our teaching shall correct their moral character and civilize them.”
The One on the throne spoke. “Do you really believe your own words, Uzaaz’El? If the situation were that simple, I would have told you. Did you not listen to the overtures of Shining One before I cast him down?”
Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1) Page 28