“How can you be so sure?”
Tarbet chuckled. “They’ve not only segregated themselves from the academic centers to stay ‘safe’ from new ideas, they’ve actually abandoned most of the artistic and intellectual disciplines altogether, without creating any compelling alternatives. They’ve grown self-righteous, shortsighted, and mentally lazy—which is exactly how I want them. Their few tenured sages are an aging minority, isolated even from the middle class, where they might find a following. Their own retreat has made it easy for us to institute unwritten screening procedures to weed out up-and-coming scholars who make serious traditionalist arguments.”
Avarnon-Set rested a claw-like hand on Tarbet’s shoulder. “I chose wisely by taking you into my confidence. Just don’t take things too far in wooing your conservatives—we don’t need a throw-back to Iyared’s time.”
Tarbet couldn’t help but laugh. “Like that’s going to happen! Our ‘Orthodox Revival’ centers only on the economy and ritual—as if they are separate worlds unto themselves. We quietly continue to advance Kunyari’s moderate spiritual and social policies. Guild economic control will feel reasonable and right to my people by the time your manufactured debt crisis is scheduled to hit—please, Lord! I know how to work my own people.”
“Of course, Tarbet. I did not mean to imply otherwise.”
A horrendous bang startled them both. Tarbet thought at first that the workers had crashed something into the monuments outside, but the sound’s direction was all wrong. A glance out the window confirmed nothing amiss.
Avarnon-Set’s private secretary had burst through the huge oaken doors at a run. He carried a sealed dispatch scroll and handed it to the Titan. “Forgive my intrusion, Lords. This came to us top-priority from the Archon. He’s ordered his army to alert status and requests that we do the same!”
“What?” Tarbet nearly wet himself as his world dropped out from under him. Another war was not the political crisis of choice just now.
Avarnon opened the wax seal on the scroll and read it. “It says here that a runner just came in from your Sacred Precincts. The Archon wishes to confer with us both before he calls together the full Court advisory staff.”
Tarbet’s blood drained from his face. “I don’t understand!”
The Titan placed the scroll on the table. “It seems that some power has just attacked the land of your sacred relics by air.”
A
diyuri had built his summer retreat right next to the old boathouse on the western shore of Paru’Ainu’s Great Riverhead Lake. Tarbet had ridden with Avarnon-Set in the latter’s sun-powered self-propelled chariot, reducing a three-day onager-back ride to a little over seven hours. He would have thoroughly enjoyed the cruise along the steep winding Sacred Highway up into the Pisunu River Gorge if not for the crisis.
Rakhau had told them that the Samyazas had made a surprise winged assault on the Sacred Orchard a little over four days ago. The Archon had requested Avarnon-Set’s aid in investigating the attack, and sent Tarbet along to smooth out any anti-titanist intolerance from the acolytic order. The ruckus that met them at Adiyuri’s opulent summerhouse was expected.
A crashed Samyaza astra blackened the front lawn, while pieces of several others littered the grounds all the way down to the lakefront. Smoke from distant fires still climbed along the grassy sides of the Kharir Urkanu, where dozens of sky chariot wrecks burned after something had blasted them out of the sky.
“How was Samyaza able to field such an advanced air fleet without your knowledge?” Tarbet asked, as the vehicle stopped in front of the small palace’s colonnade. He tried to keep any accusation from his voice.
Avarnon’s under-turned lips tightened, as he let his driver open the coach door. Somehow, his face seemed to morph into a shape just a little more human. “They must have been utterly ruthless in their secrecy. We knew they were slowly increasing their sky chariot production, but our spy drones detected no large-scale build-up of mechanized ground-attack machines or armies. Except for the embassy garrison at Dumuzida, we phased out our last occupation troops in Assuri some forty years ago—too expensive to maintain.”
“These are astras! Lumekkor helped Assuri to rebuild! Why?”
The Giant glared at him side-long. “Control yourself, Tarbet. Assuri has many resources of its own. We only helped retool their primitive civilian industrial centers—not up to Guild levels and nowhere near what we’ve given your manufacturing and port facilities at Hadumar—just enough to secure trade concessions that paid Century War reparations to both you and us. They promised never to attack the Alliance again.”
“Broken! They’ve flattened our Sacred Orchard!”
“Not according to what I see here,” said Avarnon-Set. He paused on the front stairs of the summer retreat after exiting the chariot to look over the wreckage more carefully. “We need to discuss what lies inside your Sacred Orchard, after I question these priests; don’t you think, Tarbet?”
That conversation promised to be the stuff of political nightmares.
Inside the small palace’s antechamber, a mob of priests and acolytes surrounded Tarbet and Avarnon-Set. Rakhau had mentioned that the Chief Priest of the First Altar had dropped dead during the attack, so Tarbet searched the crowd for the Assistant Head Acolyte. Old Dedurusi had been Muhet’Usalaq’s appointee, anyway. This crisis may be just what I need to clean house in the acolytic order. His deputy has Alliance leanings, if I recall correctly. He spotted the man’s face amid the murmuring clerics, and pushed his way through the assembly with Avarnon-Set in tow.
“Blessed greetings, my Lords,” said the Acting Head Acolyte with a bow. “Forgive the uproar. We are still in shock over what happened.”
Avarnon-Set asked, “What did happen?”
The Acolyte motioned them into a private sitting room before answering, and had a junior fetch wine. “The assault came suddenly, up the three Canyons of Terror. The astras fired some kind of rockets over the Kharir Aedenu, but did not cross over the mountains themselves. Then the flaming sword of the Fire-sphinx reached out from the Sacred Orchard and smote Samyaza’s sky-lords twice. Most of the attackers were burned down, though a few witnesses say that a small number escaped toward Assuri.”
Avarnon-Set said, “What is this Fire-sphinx you speak of?”
Tarbet replied, trying to stifle the tremor in his voice, “The fabled guardian of the Forbidden Orchard.”
Avarnon narrowed his whiteless eyes. “Not so fabled, I would say.”
“We don’t really know what lies over the mountains to the north,” Tarbet rubbed his smooth chin, “Unless our Leading Acolyte can elaborate?”
The Acolyte seemed to wither under the gaze of Avarnon-Set. “I’m not sure I know anything that a titan of Lumekkor would find useful.”
“Try me,” said the Giant.
“In recent times, only A’Nu-Ahki of Salaam-Surupag and Urugim the son of Q’Enukki have seen the radiance of the Guardian. Urugim died almost three hundred years ago and A’Nu-Ahki was killed at the Battle of Balimar Straits—though I heard a rumor that his body was never found. Of course, many pretenders to seerdom try the pass, but these never return.”
“What about not-so-recently?”
“Q’Enukki the Seer dwelt in holy seclusion in the Orchard for a number of months. Before that, only Atum-Ra and Mother Khuva had witnessed the Fire-sphinx, and lived to tell of it.”
The Giant nodded. “That mirrors our experiences in this region.”
Tarbet said, “What do you mean?”
“Uzaaz’El kept urging Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi to send aerodrones over your Kharir Aedenu from the north. None ever returned. Later, we tried to map the area from higher up with astras. They didn’t return either. We’ve concluded that a renegade Power must be hiding there. Your Q’Enukki lived around the time my father’s order first descended to Earth. If he visited your Orchard, his hostility to my father’s kind may have been more than just the disgruntled reaction of a man who
se traditions were being challenged.”
The Acolyte scowled.
Tarbet caught himself stroking his own chin again. “Explain.”
Avarnon-Set gazed out a large picture window at the mountainous wall toward the north. “I’m not sure. Whatever lies beyond those cliffs does not wish to be disturbed. Samyaza was always an impetuous fool. We shall not make his mistake.”
The origination of the Nephilim begins with a story of the fallen angels. Shemhazai, an angel of high rank, led a sect of angels in a descent to earth to instruct humans in righteousness. The tutelage went on for a few centuries, but soon the angels pined for the human females. After lusting, the fallen angels instructed the women in magic and conjuring, mated with them, and produced hybrid offspring: the Nephilim.
The Nephilim were gigantic in stature. Their strength was prodigious and their appetites immense. Upon devouring all of humankind’s resources, they began to consume humans themselves. The Nephilim attacked and oppressed humans and were the cause of massive destruction on the earth.
—Judd H. Burton
Encyclopedia Mythica, Judaic Mythology, Nephilim
4
Tactics
Tylurnis reeled in the ecstasy of her and Uranna’s new exalted status. We have ridden with the gods in the heart of the sacred disk! We have reached the glory of Q’Enukki and surpassed all his sons!
It was enough to make her forget the loss of her two titan husbands and the breakdown of their divine father’s plan to crush the Basilisk in Aeden. Samyaza will recover—he’s a god, after all.
She wasn’t so sure about her sister and Isha’Tahar.
Moments ago, the sacred disk had deposited them back at the Great Pyramid in Assur’Ayur, before disappearing into the night.
Tylurnis did not know how long they had traveled through its brilliant other-world spaces, from the site of the crashed command astra in the Haunted Lands—it could have been minutes or months. Samyaza’s disk had seemed larger from the inside than it had on the outside. The experience was disjointed and phantasmagorical, filled with starry lights and strange voices she could feel, like soft hands caressing her mind and body. How could the Basilisk be the source of something that felt so full and right?
Her father’s last warning sounded again in her thoughts, growing more distant and unreal each time: “I’m begging you, ‘Nissa, ‘Ranna, don’t go into that thing!” A’Nu-Ahki had said. “The Basilisk owns Samyaza and his Watchers heart and soul!”
Only then, did the skanky smell of her own sweat hit her nostrils, along with an even fouler sickly sweet reek that also clung to her skin.
Tylurnis shook her head and smiled, while she walked silently toward the Golden Pyramid. Somehow, the reek slowly became a perfume rather than a stench. She doubted her father and baby brother would escape the Haunted Lands so easily.
Isha’Tahar needed a stretcher to transport her. Somewhere along the way, Temple acolytes had replaced the attending gods as her bearers.
Uranna had remained dazed and silent since they had broken company with their father at the crash site. Tylurnis lost her smile. He’s probably in the belly of some gryndel matriarch by now. What’s that do to your precious apocalypse, Father? We both lose!
The revelation came just as she stepped into the cool darkness of the Temple. Why should I have to lose—or my sister? Samyaza has taken us as his permanent wives, now that his sons are dead! Then she remembered what the strange voices in the sacred disk had spoken. Tylurnis thought, Samyaza grieves for Isha’Tahar, though she is not yet dead. He wants a new first wife and a new mouthpiece not so feeble with age; yet mature enough to know how the world operates—and he’s always been attracted to twins!
All he needs is a new model for his vision when he recovers.
The ideas flooded into ‘Nissa’s head, as if heaven’s wisdom emptied itself into her thirsty mind. She thought she heard the rush of mighty waters filling—ever filling—until her thoughts floated skyward and sharpened to perfect starlight clarity. Everything finally made sense.
Tylurnis knew that Samyaza would visit her and her sister soon, if not that very night.
She would know what to do when the time came.
A
rch-tacticon Inguska laid his sky-lord uniform aside for the last time. It was too painful to look at. His career had been one long journey of disappointment and defeat, haunted by tantalizing specters of promised success that had always vanished, just as they wooed him into their grasp.
First had been his acceptance into the Demigods during the Century War, then into the Second Sky-lords Division—only to have their mighty Vimana airships made obsolete by Lumekkor’s aerodrones, and sent to inner border patrol. When he had risen by diligence and sharp eyes to command his own airship, fate snatched it quickly from him by the cruelest irony.
He’d had the success of his mission in his hands. He had destroyed an enemy spy chariot that had probed Assuri’s borders through the Haunted Lands, which stretched like a vast moat of river, jungle, and swamp, with an inner wall of mountains, between Assuri and its enemies. Inguska had captured two of the spy chariot’s operators alive for interrogation, even after the vehicle’s sky-cannons had massacred many airships like his own. Then, just as he had returned to his own vessel with his prize, everything changed.
A second enemy war chariot burst through the trees and had destroyed his Vimana, with its crew, in a burst of sky-cannon fire. He and the very commanding titan of Second Sky-lords, who had entrusted himself to his care, had been captured. That was when the real humiliation began throughout some fifty years as a prisoner of war in the distant slave labor camps of Lumekkor.
His two prisoners from the enemy spy chariot became his captors for the remainder of their journey to Lumekkor’s camp. To make it worse, one of them had treated him with pity! Not just pity, but a wholly contemptible kindness unlike anything Inguska had ever known. It was as though the war itself was meaningless. An enemy should treat a captured Demigod as the danger that he is! My lack of stigmata caused him to assume that I was a lowborn man of earth like himself; though, I didn’t prove dangerous to them in the end, did I?
Inguska sealed the lid on his uniform in its ivory box. He would never forget the face of that liberated prisoner who had stripped him of his dignity. They had at least crippled my titan by smashing his kneecaps and cutting his horns! Me they had thought so little of that they left me tied with common rope in the care of a kindly philosopher, who protected me as if I was a woman! I was ready to die for you, Samyaza!
For fifty years, Inguska languished at one of Lumekkor’s easier labor camps, half glad and wholly humiliated for avoiding a sentence to Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi’s Tartaros mine pits, where the Alliance chained titans like mere beasts in hard labor, flame, and torment deep beneath the earth.
Inguska’s repatriation after the war had only added to his weight of shame. Lumekkor disbanded the Demigods, and had Samyaza’s armies publicly stripped of their weapons and authority. Many had hidden, only to be turned-in by mobs of angry city dwellers that months earlier had worshipped them as gods and heroes. It was not until the entire region threatened to collapse into lawlessness that the occupying overlords agreed to allow the Lord of Heaven a force of priestly constables to help keep order.
Thirty years, Lumekkor had stayed to “re-organize” things. They thought so little of Samyaza that they even allowed him to keep his Temple at Assur’Ayur. They cared only to rob Assuri’s bounty, and rebuild his sacred industries just enough to milk them forever. They still robbed Assuri of his rightful place in the world—still trampled the Lord of Heaven under their feet—though now they shod their feet in velvet instead of iron.
Assuri’s people ate their fill and thought no more of the Eternal Struggle and the Great God’s Mouthpiece on Earth—except in certain outlying districts, like the one Inguska had grown up in. The rural peasants had retained some fear of Heaven’s Mouthpiece, while the rich ports and rubber plantatio
ns had coddled every enemy vice.
The Final Assault was supposed to have changed all that.
After the overlords from Bab’Tubila left forty years ago, Samyaza had quietly regained control of the sacred industries. Slowly, he had found and punished the malcontents in the cities, one by one, until the people knew that their true lord had taken shape again. That was when the old sky-lords had been called together, and after a few years more, openly re-instituted with a ragtag fleet of ancient Vimanas and a few old aerodrones that had just barely survived the Century War.
It had been enough sky power to crush a major rebellion among the rubber plantations between Meldur and Satyurati, however. Inguska himself had led the raid that killed the insurrection’s leader—a fat rubber farmer named Telemnuk—who burned with the last of his usurpers inside his own tree mansion, when the missiles from Inguska’s ship detonated. That earned Inguska the next-highest possible rank he could achieve with his bloodline.
He remembered his recommissioning at the beginning of the Plantation Rebellion as a sub-tacticon. The honor seemed dubious, and his promotion only slightly less so, until the High Titans, Ivvayi and Ayyaho, had briefed the Demigods on their new strategic goal after putting down the Rebellion.
Instead of flailing uselessly at the Great Basilisk’s many strong arms, as they had done in the Century War, they would crush its head—just as the Prophecy of Hope had predicted from the dawn of time.
For the first time, Samyaza’s Temple enthusiastically began to encourage trade and technical assistance from Lumekkor. It had allowed select Assurim emigration to other parts of the world—especially to places where Tubaal-qayin’s Industrial Guild had key manufacturing facilities and interests. Within a few short years, the plans for an advanced astra engine were smuggled into Assur’Ayur. Samyaza then enlightened his priestly engineers accordingly for the new work at hand.
A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) Page 8