A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

  Varkun raised his arms to the brilliant disk, and shouted something in a coarse, unknown tongue. Tiva heard a squeak escape her throat when again the music and dance instantly stopped.

  She felt herself carried through the midst of the silent mob toward the terrifying minstrel of Under-world. At Varkun’s feet lay Farsa and Tsulia, both in some kind of trance. On either side of him stood two glowing gray men with huge eyes—obsidian portals into a gibbering madness where voices pressed into Tiva’s head. Those eyes penetrated her soul with cold insect hunger, as the scratchy voices called others of their kind to swarm and feed. Tiva still would not look up at what had been Kernui, but everything came together, as she fell helplessly to the ground by her two girl friends.

  Now that it was too late, she finally admitted to herself what was happening. A’Nu-Ahki had described the Watchers to her and Khumi when he had spoken of his own encounter with Samyaza. Had she not also been reading of them in Q’Enukki’s scroll? And T’Qinna—oh E’Yahavah, why didn’t I listen to T’Qinna? She knows this stuff!

  The gray one that had carried her now stepped around overhead so she could no longer avoid looking at his face. He stooped down, and laid his hand on her forehead gently. His mouth never moved, but Tiva could hear him speak. The familiarity of his voice made her shake from the inside.

  “I have come to take you as one of my wives, little forest nymph. Do not worry. I have faces and forms more appealing to you than this one.”

  The blank gray face of the creature morphed into Kernui—except that his eyes remained black as the shrieking void.

  Tiva wailed—a long cry of Under-world’s damned that stretched from deep inside her chest, and echoed far off into the forest night.

  She had never connected before how both Kernui and Pahn spoke with the same voice—one in her head, the other outside.

  Yet Pahn’s voice had always carried a haunting similarity to one other, even before Kernui came. Somehow, she had never quite been able to place it. Nor had she thought about placing it, until now that it came across to her in its undisguised clarity: The Creature had the same mage-like voice that used to possess Yargat when he spoke to her during “counseling” sessions inside the Shrine.

  The ‘medical examination’ to which abductees are said to be subjected, often accompanied by sadistic sexual manipulation, is reminiscent of the medieval tales of encounters with demons. It makes no sense in a sophisticated or technical framework: any intelligent being equipped with the scientific marvels that UFOs possess would be in a position to achieve any of these alleged scientific objectives in a shorter time and with fewer risks.

  —Dr. Jaques Vallee

  Confrontations, p. 13

  14

  Union

  The hearth danced in tongues of fire that seemed to keep time with the lyre and pipes. T’Qinna and U’Sumi played accompaniment to the evening worship song of Q’Enukki’s Retreat, lilting strings, dark and majestic, with tubular cyclones of sound that pierced the outer shadows with swordsman strokes. Interludes of dust-dry monophonic chant croaked from old Muhet’Usalaq, or sometimes a more melodious A’Nu-Ahki. The younger folk received the wisdom-cry of ancients, their heavy tones sonorous, sad, and grand.

  It seemed strange that news of Kunyari’s Colossus should fade so quickly to the back of A’Nu-Ahki’s thoughts. He had planned tonight to teach on its prophetic significance—Colossus destroyed with World-end Obelisks unscathed—the divine message was unmistakable, a little too unmistakable perhaps. What more could he possibly add that even the most hardened skeptic did not already know deep down inside?

  Instead, Nu let U’Sumi and T’Qinna’s music soar his heart into the heavenlies—where the interpretation of prophetic omens was always a moot point. It was enough that a new generation would venerate E’Yahavah in their own language—from their own hearts, in their own music—even if it were only a generation of four.

  The Colossus news only underscored for him that he had wept long enough for his world. His children would be the patriarchs and matriarchs of a new and hopefully better age, free of the oppressive decay and violence of dying civilizations. They would have a clean slate, informed by the elder wisdom, hopefully free of the infected pride and prejudice that had deformed so many otherwise good patriarchal traditions.

  Nu smiled at his son and daughter-in-law. Then a new thought sobered him like a battle-axe to the skull: Do you seriously believe they are not already developing new prides and prejudices of their own?

  A’Nu-Ahki suddenly felt the five-hundred-year gulf between himself and his sons like a gaping wound. He almost quivered to a sob when U’Sumi and T’Qinna returned his smile, their eyes so open and teachable—so unprepared for what lay ahead. No! I will not go there today! Now we must draw warmth from above, and from each other, against the World-end night!

  Darkness had fallen outside by the time U’Sumi and T’Qinna put up their instruments. Everyone looked to A’Nu-Ahki with anticipation.

  They look to me for nearly everything now. After all these centuries, I still don’t understand how I’m supposed to comfort them—yet somehow I do. Perhaps if I had understood and acted earlier, there would be more people in this hall looking back at me than my own children. He put aside the encroaching despair, and panned across the chamber to return their collective gazes. He sensed fleetingly that someone was missing.

  Muhet’Usalaq’s sharp eyes squinted out at him from a sheath of heavily tufted white brows. His dried apple face and hoary beard waited in the silence after the music, as though sensing an approaching storm.

  A’Nu-Ahki glanced down at his father. Lumekki hardly seemed aware at all of his surroundings, imprisoned in his wheeled chair behind cloudy eyes, with a face that hung limp on one side.

  The Old Soldier’s isolation however, was not as complete as it appeared. He communicated only in scribbled half sentences through a trembling hand on a wax tablet. The head wound sustained at the Battle of Balimar Straits had left him paralyzed on one side, and from the waist down. Despite this, his mind was alert. A’Nu-Ahki had learned to tune his ears for the sound of a scratching stylus. Tonight, Lumekki’s writing hand seemed unusually agitated. It did not reach for the wax tablet in his lap pouch, however.

  Nu looked questioningly to his wife when he saw his father’s good hand shaking. Na’Amiha had developed a remarkable rapport with the Old Tacticon. She sat with a towel next to the wheeled chair, and periodically wiped the drool from Lumekki’s lips. Somehow, she managed this without drawing attention. Nu smiled at the irony. If anyone else tried to wipe him that way, Lumekki would grunt and growl as an outraged bear. In whatever wordless language they shared, she had spared the dignity of this once great army officer in a way Nu wished he could emulate.

  Perhaps, he thought, it was that Na’Amiha had earned the Old Soldier’s respect long before the crippling wound. It was no small thing to marry into the Seer Clan from the House of Tubaal-qayin.

  Nu sighed, and wished again that the rest of Akh’Uzan would assess her on her merits instead of on where she came from.

  A’Nu-Ahki moved his eyes to Iyapeti and his young wife. When he saw Sutara, he realized who was missing.

  Sutara’s mother, Galkuna, was in the process of moving up to Q’Enukki’s Retreat after what everyone hoped would be a temporary falling out with her husband. She had carted the last of her things up to the monastery earlier that day.

  A’Nu-Ahki asked his daughter-in-law, “Didn’t your mother say she’d be here tonight?”

  “Yes,” Sutara said, “She should be here by now. I’m getting scared. There’s too much noise up Grove Hollow way. It’s different from their usual racket, less music, and more screaming. It gave me the chills when I went out to the gate to watch for her, earlier.”

  Na’Amiha said, “Do you think Khumi and Tiva are okay?”

  “I left Khumi at the drydock an hour ago,” Iyapeti answered. “He said he was working late. He didn’t look well—rather
worried and tense.”

  T’Qinna almost whispered, “That means Tiva’s alone.”

  Sutara turned to her sister-in-law. “Normally, I’d say that Tiva can take care of herself. But things are different out there tonight.”

  U’Sumi asked his father, “Should we go up to check on her?”

  Nu paused before answering, asking silently for E’Yahavah’s wisdom. “No,” he said, “at least not yet. I feel in my spirit the need to focus on Tiva tonight. I’ve been under the weight of it for years. The trouble she’s in now won’t go away by our physically going up there in strength of arms. We have another, more effective way to fight, and it’s past time we got down to it.”

  A’Nu-Ahki fell to his knees, and began to call out to E’Yahavah.

  K

  humi climbed the dark hillside trail where it wound beneath the rocky face over which the retreat’s battlements hung. Celestial music partially drowned out the raucous noise wafting down from Grove Hollow.

  Has the Hollow changed its sound, or have I simply outgrown it? he wondered sadly.

  The singing from his father’s monastery filtered through angry shadows, a chorus of E’Yahavah’s guardians that called him to protection against the specter—maddened night. Fear crawled up his spine—fear for himself, fear for his wife.

  Tiva will be at the Hollow anyway, he figured with a sullen resignation. He had no desire to join her there, but the noise from that direction made him want to go up and make sure of her safety. Why has she changed so much? Why can’t she just grow up a little? I suppose I should go up and apologize to her, though…

  The Voice in Khumi’s head was suddenly not his own: “Go up now, and neither of you shall ever return. Stay, and she has an opportunity to live.”

  Khumi had no idea what had just happened, but he suspected that the whisper had come from some place deep—a place where only his father dared tread. For the first time since before his father and brothers had gone to war, he felt like taking part in a family worship, if only to drive off the chill that had slowly settled over his life.

  At the top of the rise, Khumi chose. He turned toward the light of his father’s fortress quietly. The gate, as always, was unbarred.

  V

  arkun chanted, “The moon is full, and Tiamatu rises to kiss its essence! Who sings forth the sacred primal urge?”

  “Freedom sings from the heartbeat of Earth, our mother!” answered Moon-chaser, Sariya, and all of the Witchy Girls.

  Tiva saw flickering horned shadows like little goat demons among the gathering, all behind a firefly light that emanated from Pahn’s sickly body in whirling patterns that somehow made everything seem putrid and degraded. The mushrooms rushed to their full effect, filling her with a helpless dropping sensation. She knew beyond any doubt that no net made by the hand of man could break her fall. All the world tumbled in after her, over the crumbling edge of an ever widening abyss deeper and darker than Under-world’s gaping mouth.

  In the fading firelight at the top of the hole, Varkun donned the head-mask of a crested wyverna, and made a bloodcurdling shriek. “The Basilisk sent the wurm to hunt down the weak and ignorant so their feeble seed would not taint our vigorous blood! We applaud the Sacred Dragon, and pledge him brides!”

  Tiva felt herself disappearing, as though her very personhood had become food for some all-consuming pack of psychic wurms. What little controlled movement her body had left froze when the Dragon Priest gazed at her as through the long tunnel with eyes that danced in wicked fire from inside the mask. She had seen those eyes before.

  Varkun screamed, “Give yourself to him!”

  A stench of defecation and rotting flesh wafted over the Hollow. The individual named Tiva felt herself sinking inward toward total personality extinction. Something dark and huge injected its way into her heart like a black oily fluid, and began to squeeze out the elements of who she was, bit by bit, bubble by bubble, away into outer darkness. No matter how much of her Tiva-ness oozed out, not one particle of her ability to feel the pain and horror diminished. Her stomach churned as her arms involuntarily reached out to the gray perversion she had once imagined was her friend.

  A’

  Nu-Ahki met Khumi at the common hall door, and motioned him toward a seat inside, by the firelight.

  His father’s first words should have shocked him, but somehow they didn’t. “To say that we’re praying for your wife, Khumi, would be using too mild a word for it. We sense the battle for her very will is reaching its climax even as we speak.”

  Khumi felt clumsy and out of place as he sat down by U’Sumi and T’Qinna. He tried to join in with his father’s prayer, but the words stuck in his throat. Despite his desperation, and even the danger he sensed Tiva was in, he found it impossible to focus the way the others seemed to. If not for the voice that he had just heard on the trail, he would have accused his father and brothers of cowardice for not rushing up there with him to see if she needed help. Just what am I supposed to be doing anyway?

  A’Nu-Ahki remained standing, and prompted his tiny army like an arch-straticon. “Fight for that girl! Plead for her before E’Yahavah like she’s your very life itself!”

  T

  iva’s hand stopped short of touching the clammy gray mockery.

  The Dragon Priest held up a tiny crystal vial to the garish light of the hovering blue disk, and cried, “This is the black ambrosia. It cries to prepare the chosen bride of the Horned One to receive the seed of her master!”

  Tiva found that she could now move. She tried to rise, and push herself away from the creature called Pahn. Polypy hands wrestled her back to the ground. Varkun brought the terrible black vial, and thrust it toward her lips. Panic closed her eyes in an attempt to escape his gaze. The hands that held her fast became constricting snakes entwined around her legs, arms, and neck.

  Even tightly-shut eyes could not relieve her from the vision. In the red darkness behind her eye lids, Tiva saw Pahn melt from his guise as Kernui into a form even more horrifying than the gray creature that overshadowed her. A gruesome reptilian face with a unicorn horn, and a greasy beard like that of a dirty old man, leered out at her from the terror-haunted depths of her earliest childhood nightmares. Coarse hair covered his bottom half, above feet that were cloven goat hooves.

  The consuming Beast spoke to her now completely in that awful voice Tiva had always found so strangely familiar, but which she could never quite place. She had no trouble recognizing it now, however. It was the voice of Yargat, “You shall now be my wife. I shall have you body and soul. There was never any other Aeden for you than this!”

  A’

  Nu-Ahki huddled together with the others, and shouted, “Strength, E’Yahavah; give her your power to escape the Dragon’s teeth!”

  T

  iva screamed, and somehow bolted to her feet. People flew from her body as though they were tiny children. Panic seized her arms and legs, and hurled the startled dragon priest into the surrounding mob. His bottle of “black ambrosia” flew from his hand to shatter in the fire pit, sputtering to an oily green flame.

  Tiva stood inside a ring of entranced people with gray-glow Watchers evenly distributed among them. She turned about to avoid being taken from behind, and held out her arms to fend off any attackers.

  The people of Grove Hollow seemed puzzled and afraid—distant, as though Tiva only saw them only through a long misty tunnel. The gray ones appeared to urge them on, pitiless, black, insect eyes visiting silent threats. They closed in on her again.

  The Farsa-thing, now awake and on her feet, tried to coax Tiva with promises that it wasn’t what it seemed, while the sallow whine of the walking-corpse-woman named Sariya cried how Tiva had misunderstood—that it would make sense if she only gave it a chance. Varkun stood by Farsa, his arm around her putrefying hips. At their feet lay Tsulia—Tiva’s childhood friend had not come out of her trance.

  Tiva flew in the opposite direction. She bowled through the throng, tossing
aside Watcher and human alike like straw effigies, to reach the concealing forest. All around her, the horned shadows flickered and writhed. She heard the creature that called himself ‘Moon-chaser’ call after her, and promise that it was all just a big joke—that it wasn’t real.

  She refused to listen, and increased her speed.

  Tangled roots and undergrowth grabbed at her bare legs, wurm claws that answered the summons of Pahn, their forest master. Tiva jerked her wrap free from a clutching bush. Above the trees, the brilliant blue disk followed, flickering down into the woods to create a disorienting miasma of light and shadow that threatened to rob her of any sense of direction. It also seemed to serve as a beacon for the hunters.

  An impenetrable thorn thicket forced her to pause. Which way is the path? Oh E’Yahavah, Which way is the vulping path?

  She chose left, since the other direction sloped down to the brook.

  The shifting light overhead shone brighter, while the calling voices grew nearer. A crescent of pursuit threatened to reach around and engulf her on all sides. Off to the right, she caught sight of a gray one between the trees. The creature seemed much larger than it had been before. Labored breath like swamp gas death, it saw her also, and pointed a skeletal finger her way. Tiva froze again when its mouth fell open in a howl like that of her own screeching inner void. The thing approached, while she plugged her ears in a useless attempt to ward off the paralyzing noise. This was the first time Tiva had seen them use their mouths to communicate. Now she knew why.

  The Gray One approached through the trees, pointing and shrieking. Its mouth opened wider and wider as it drew closer, jaws detached like some huge albino snake with a lipless maw that stretched outward to devour her whole. Tiva could smell the Watcher’s foul breath. Its gaping lower jaw now stretched below its chest to reveal rows of poisoned needle teeth. Flaps of skin on either side of the mouth undulated in rubbery waves, driven by the bloated wind of a thousand opened tombs.