A ruling Archon of Seti, among many other things, had to be a competent astronomer. Seti the Great had pioneered the celestial arts, and received the divinely inspired interpretation of the Twelve Star Signs, with their lesser constellations. Nine previous Archons had followed this path, and the tenth was not about to neglect tradition—especially now.
Tarbet peered through the giant telescope of the Archonic Observatory Ziggurat perched on a lonely peak north of his capitol city of Sa-utar. He could make no sense of what he saw; much less, offer the spiritual interpretation he knew would shortly be required.
I must somehow appease both my own people and Lumekkor’s titans! That will be impossible, since they each give Tiamatu opposite meanings in the cosmic message! The Archon fumed, as he tried to keep his other hand from shaking at the focus knob. He glanced up to make sure his companion had not noticed his trembling.
The Titan Avarnon-Set—master of Lumekkor’s technocratic Guild—sat on the tandem seat next to Tarbet, hunched over the scope’s second eyepiece. The deformed creature made low, barely audible growls, while claw-like fingers scratched his gigantic wolf-ape head.
The Archon quickly looked back into the scope when the sky brightened. The quickfire arcs between the comet and the wobbling egg-shaped disk of Tiamatu flared up. Then something unexpected happened.
The comet’s head began to circle the planet, which itself seemed to move out of the way. For an elating second, the two heavenly bodies swung around each other like wrestlers, spiraling to the attack. Tarbet was almost sure the comet would somehow fly free again in the end. Instead, it broke apart and tumbled into the planet, which opened a gigantic, fiery mouth, all the way down to its core, to receive the splintered ice-ball. A shock wave rippled through the exposed mantle, which had burst through the planet’s crust in gravity-driven volcanic tides. The reddened orb expanded to consume the comet deep within its belly—ice to instant explosive steam.
Tiamatu shattered into millions of rapidly cooling shards, while its solid, super-dense inner core split into two unequal hemispheres. The debris was quickly lost to Tarbet’s sight in a hazy nebula formed by dust, and the vanished comet’s tail. The collision had taken only seconds.
A new quickfire dance began to light up the slowly diffusing cloud of the dismembered heavenly combatants. Arcs jumped between larger fragments to equalize new variances of charm potentials generated by catastrophic dust friction. These were dimmer than the initial lightning, but still kept the night skies aglow with their spreading radiance.
Tarbet looked up from his eyepiece, cotton-mouthed. What am I going to tell them? This is the most significant heavenly omen of the last millennium—of all history! Can I afford to call a council of priests? Will that make me look weak in the eyes of the sons of Seti?
A strange voice whispered, “There need be no council.”
“What?” the Archon asked, disoriented.
Avarnon-Set lifted his head from the eyepiece. His white-less eyes were metallic mirrors into the cold, empty abyss. “I said nothing.”
Tarbet wondered for a second about the sudden assurance that he would need no council. Where had it come from—stress, intuition? Could I have just experienced the prophetic gift of the ancient Archon-Seers?
Without a thought, the answers came. Blood rushed back into Tarbet’s head with a new energy, like charm to a quickfire pearl.
“Great One,” the Archon said, “this heavenly omen need not be dark and unthinkable to your people. Nor must it create arrogance in mine.”
“Tiamatu, our wisdom star is shattered! It can only mean that the Powers will favor Aztlan when war comes. What other omen could it be?”
“What indeed?” Tarbet smiled. “Does not Aztlan hope in Tiamatu as you do? Do you not remember your plans for a global empire, with an all-inclusive priesthood based here at Sa-utar?”
“Yes, but what is that to us now? If Psydonu and At’Lahazh succeed in developing the Fire of the Gods, as our intelligence assures us they will, what do you think will happen to the likes of you? If we attack first, we still will not have the forces to occupy all of Aztlan, or enough divine fire to destroy even half of their major military colonies on the Southern Landmass. The Fire of the Gods is a deterrent, not a battlefield weapon!”
The Archon saw many great fire mushrooms through his eyelids and shuddered. “Do not lose hope! We don’t know that Aztlan has the Fire of the Gods yet. Even if they do, would it not still serve as a deterrent if two titan powers had divine fire, and balanced each other off to avoid what might turn into a literal World-end of flame? What if this sign can give us the key to the hearts of all humanity, and make war unnecessary? What if we could conquer Aztlan with peace, and free the very promise of Aeden?”
The Giant cocked his head just a little. “How?”
Tarbet felt a rush of energy flood his senses like “Luwinna” making love to him. “All religions need prophets, and signs of divine favor. A global sign able to embody a different hope for each tribe is the best omen of all!”
“What are you babbling about?”
“I’ve just been given an interpretation of the heavenly drama that will give new hope to your people, and restore centuries of lost dignity to mine. Even Pandura and the titans of Aztlan will not want to resist it!”
As if to confirm the Archon’s prophetic authority, the earth itself began to sway and moan, as it had several nights before.
Telescopes at Temple City Epymetu in northern Aztlan had to compete with the last violets of sunset on the horizon, but the sorcerer-priestess Pandura needed no better view of Leviathan’s destruction. She could read the meaning both for herself and for her two titan lords well enough. The question was, how to spin it?
It was impossible for her not to recall the words of A’Nu-Ahki the Seer, spoken to her nearly half a century ago. He had been her prisoner then, with no foreseeable escape. That had not stopped him from brainwashing Pandura’s own granddaughter and then vanishing with the girl’s help. They had left a trail across Aztlan, with every attempt to recapture them bungled by such odd “coincidences” that Pandura could not help having A’Nu-Ahki’s final words burned into her memory:
“In forty-eight years the plagues you’ve spawned will have consumed you and your people so thoroughly that the destruction E’Yahavah sends will be welcomed as a mercy killing.”
With almost forty-four of those forty-eight years gone, it was impossible to be undisturbed by the heavenly sign.
“Seers have spoken by evil spirits before,” Pandura reminded herself under her breath—again. “To destroy the world for its so-called ‘evil’ is far more evil than anything humanity can do. That leaves the Judge guilty of a greater crime than those he condemns. A’Nu-Ahki’s E’Yahavah has a moral blind spot.” She leaned back and saw a triumphant smile on her reflection in the glass lens. Gold-red hair haloed the perfection of her milky face and jade eyes. “Enough nonsense, you have work to do!”
Her personal astra waited at the airstrip, already fueled for the journey that would make victory possible.
She dismounted the telescope seat in her observatory atop the pyramid-capped genetics laboratory that she knew her underlings referred to as “Pandura’s Box.” The joke was harmless enough, so she allowed them their little fun at her expense. There were too many real problems to worry about these days. The crystal orb by the telescope mount already glowed in divided hemispheres. The faces of her two titan lords, one on each side, stared out at her from the spiritual ether.
Dark Psydonu undressed her with huge manic eyes spaced just a little too far apart on a head that was disturbingly wide. His pouting mouth and over-fat lips, even with his curly black beard, seemed infantile. Daylight shone from behind his head, somewhere on the Great Outer Ocean underneath the world, where he commanded Aztlan’s Deep Ocean Fleet. The other face was pale. At’Lahazh sat in nightshades, under the Firedrake Rainforest of the Far South. Neither titan had ready access to an observatory, or e
ven a clear naked-eye view of the heavenly spectacle, because of daylight or excessive tree cover.
“Tell us how it went!” Psydonu demanded. He looked to her like some petulant bearded baby in need of a pacifier.
Pandura smiled for them, just to let their agitation linger. “Tiamatu is destroyed. I’ve trapped the spectacle on a crystal ampoule, which I will bring with me. A copy will reach you, At’Lahazh, by astral courier.”
At’Lahazh furrowed his brow. “Is this omen good or bad? Uggu of Lumekkor clearly hoped in Tiamatu’s ascendance, but so did we. How can the same omen serve both sides in the conflict?”
Pandura laughed. “My darling titans, you are both blinded by an over-abundance of your male essence. It isn’t important what happened to Leviathan’s World, but how we interpret and apply what happened.”
“The gods have not spoken to me yet,” Psydonu said. “They usually give me a vision on something this important by now!”
Pandura shrugged. “What would you have them say? We already know what we need to know. Time is our only requirement.”
At’Lahazh asked, “What are your latest estimates, my Priestess?”
Pandura did not like the timing coincidence. “My mages tell me we can move in five years. My interpretation of the omen is that haste brings destruction. It takes time to properly synthesize and then concentrate the divine substance in spinners.”
“In that time, Lumekkor can strike with the fire of their gods!” Psydonu almost whined.
“That is unlikely,” the Priestess said. “My operatives assure me that they do not even have enough sacred arrows to reach half of our Temple facilities. That, and they do not have a clear idea of where our Deep Ocean Fleet is—remember all their astras are still land-based. In addition, they have only detected a small fraction of our troop movements under the cover of Firedrake Forest. Our hidden roads there are near completion. Lumekkor will not use its sacred fire under such uncertain conditions.”
“But they will still have more of it, even once we attain ours!”
Gods, he can be such an infant! Pandura pictured herself slapping some sense into Psydonu’s huge frightened-baby face, him wearing a diaper. “Since we hold the Great South in tribute, we have more of the sacred ore in its raw form, and are refining it at a twenty percent higher rate than their facilities can.”
At’Lahazh said, “Will it be enough?”
She sat down on her orb console, and leaned toward the glass globe. “If we are patient, and our initiatives to buy time are successful, yes.”
Psydonu’s temper changed. “Has Assuri taken the bait?”
Pandura fluffed her hair and yawned. “I think so. But I’ll need to join you at sea right now if they have.”
At’Lahazh said, “Wouldn’t it be better to wait?”
Pandura finished stretching. “Samyaza is impatient. The faster we respond, the more secure he will feel. The more secure he feels, the bolder and more persistent his assassins will be. This shielded ether layer will be open for our communications, and my mages know what to do here.”
Psydonu smiled. “Then you had better fly to me, my love.”
The Priestess noted At’Lahazh’s scowl. Their mother, Klyeto, took a dim view on Pandura playing around with her sons—especially Psydonu, who was also Klyeto’s husband. At’Lahazh is even more the mauma’s boy!
“I leave now.” Pandura caressed the lever that broke their astral connection, making the orb go dark. She stood up, and stepped onto the lift platform that traveled down the pyramid’s core.
Stench assaulted the High Priestess’ nostrils the moment she reached the court level, and exited the atrium tunnel. The ovens now belched their reeking reminder of her mounting failures twenty-four hours a day, and still could not keep up with the accumulating bodies, either dead from the plagues, or from her own Emergency Genetic Purification Edicts.
“I hate this place,” Pandura muttered, then hushed lest a passing priestly technician overhear. I built this Temple to make the perfect human being! But each thing that flew from “Pandura’s Box” has become a nightmare! Now that I would close the box, I’m powerless to do so. I wish I could escape this place—vanish like the mad seer and my granddaughter!
A multi-headed snake dropped into her path from out of a withered tree that had once been part of a green belt around the inner Temple Mound. The High Priestess fought down her panic by folding her arms against her chest. Her left armpit throbbed again with its deep stinging itch. She ran a hand underneath her loose-fitted wrap, and felt over the small lesions there.
Pandura began to wonder if she even had five years.
“Judgment begins in heaven,” U’Sumi said, eyes to the glowing sky.
A’Nu-Ahki replied, “New-world is formed by the dividing of Tiamatu’s carcass.”
When it seemed that the celestial show had settled to a sparkling aftermath, the family descended quietly from the ziggurat, back to the fortress-monastery, and their separate quarters.
A’Nu-Ahki and ‘Miha’s suite above the library had been expanded into the central courtyard with a boxed-spiral ramp to accommodate Lumekki’s special medical needs since his return from the Aztlan War. The couple detoured to check in on the old veteran.
The first thing A’Nu-Ahki noticed when they turned up the lamp was how peaceful his father looked. The bilateral disfigurement from having muscle control on only one side of his face had disappeared. Then Nu saw, with almost no surprise at all, that Lumekki had stopped breathing.
“The Tacticon waited for the final stroke against his age-long foe,” Nu said, clasping his father’s wrist.
“I’m sorry, love.” Na’Amiha wrapped her arms around her husband’s shoulders. Her pale skin and gray-streaked strawberry blond hair shone in the dim flicker of the lamp.
Nu released his father’s hand, and took his wife’s. “He dies young, but his years speak a prophecy, like his words over my cradle.”
“What do you mean?”
Nu squeezed her hand. “He was seven hundred and seventy-seven years old today.” In Q’Enukki’s Tablet of Numeric Symbolism, which used null-glyph decimal rather than the common sexagesimal ciphers, three represented divine unity; and seven the number of sacred completion. In Q’Enukkian calculus, the number was represented by three Bull’s Head glyphs, each of which represented the value of seven—hundreds, tens, and ones. “I just hope I can be the Comforter of A’Nu he was always so sure of.”
“You already are. You have been for a long time.”
A’Nu-Ahki gazed off into the lamplight. “Am I? Only now does the real trial approach. Everything else has been trivial compared to it.”
She wrapped herself around him. “I have confidence in you, and even more in the work of E’Yahavah through you.”
“Poets once likened Divine justice to the rage of a woman scorned. The story probably comes from Nhod, where the Comet Umara struck, and left its crater of bitter water. The Nhoddim see the Earth as a woman and Umara as an act of rape and desertion by the sky gods. The tale passed to the Y’Raddim and from them to Lumekkor, who passed it to us. We know Umara was a divine judgment against the murderer Qayin. Seti used the story as a parable—where the woman seeks E’Yahavah’s justice against the wrongs done on Earth by men. The sages call her Nemesis.”
“You shouldn’t trouble yourself with such things now, Nu. Does that mind of yours never rest? You are all the comfort I’ve ever needed; all the comfort any of us need, by E’Yahavah’s will.”
Nu held his wife out from him and peered into her eyes. “Really? What comfort am I against the rage of Nemesis?”
Angry light flashed over the waterfall hill above Grove Hollow, where two young women lay in the open. The stream cut like a dagger through the rocky outcropping’s moss covering before tumbling over the small cataract to the pool below.
One of the women cried, “Stop it!”
“Quit whimpering!” Sariya sat up and slapped Farsa across the face to bring her o
ut of her panic attack. “You never had any complaints before!”
“It’s the sky!”
Sariya rolled her eyes. “They’re just stupid lights—not even as bright as the Helpers’ disks! Focus on me!”
“Helpers don’t kill planets! And if you ever slap me again…”
“You’ll do what?” Sariya pushed Farsa away from her as if Farsa had rolled in a pile of behemoth scat. “Go to the moss! You used to be somebody I could respect! Now you’re all afraid of your own shadow most the time!”
Farsa had no reply. She often felt the same way about herself these days. Not even the extra-potent Girl’s Elixir she secretly took from her old academy marm gave her confidence any more. What’s wrong with me? The other girls used to fear me! Now even Tsulia jokes about me!
Sariya ran a hand over her nubby scalp, where there used to be the most luxuriant black curls. “This was s’posed to be special—the Helpers even told me! I wanted to spend it with you, but now you’ve ruined the mood again like a selfish, whining babo!”
Farsa snorted. “I ruin things? Look at the fire in the sky, S’riya! The Helpers said the comet would miss!”
“Vulpin’ go to the Wisdom Tree, Farsa! They said it would likely miss—they didn’t guarantee it! Maybe you should just make up with Varkun or something, ‘cause I don’t think it’s working for us anymore!”
“Fine! I’ll go to the Tree and Varkun! At least he never slapped me!”
Farsa got up and left Sariya, almost more relieved than hurt. The lights in the sky flickered through the haze infused trees enough to reveal the trail. Moon-chaser’ll be there too.
Farsa needed to unload her troubles on her older brother, like she did in the old days—if his cow Tsulia will let me!
Somehow, the clingy image of Tsulia reminded her of an old friend—which was odd, because Tsulia rarely stirred up fond memories. Then Farsa recalled that Tiva and Tsulia had been children together. Tsuli was there when I gave Tiva a place to stay after she ran away from her father—now I remember. Snot-nosed cow even tried to talk Tiva out of it!
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 4
