The Archon smiled. “In the meantime, allow me to put you up at the best inn in Farguti, which we’ve commandeered for our officers and myself.”
Henumil was relieved to leave Avarnon-Set behind in the tent. Tarbet accompanied the party from Upper Akh’Uzan to the inn—a baked-brick building bathed in the too-early red glow of the afternoon sun. The Archon ordered wine and food for himself and the weary travelers.
The dark mood of the outside colors lessened with each round of drinks Tarbet ordered, until the warmth in Henumil’s belly dulled his senses so that even news confirming Muhet’Usalaq’s death would not have bothered him. It seemed odd to him that not even this harbinger, for which he had been conditioned since earliest childhood to make ready, could not disturb him with the folly of getting drunk at the very edge of the safety zone. We deserve a little reward. The Archon himself must be acting as E’Yahavah’s envoy to reassure us in our distress.
So came the languid thoughts of Akh’Uzan’s Chief Dragon-slayer as, under the pouring hand of the “Children’s Archon,” he slid into an inebriated haze, while evening and morning slipped into the fourth day.
Light filtered onto the amidships mezzanine deck through ventilation slits on either side of the long hull pool that ran part of the way aftward between Barque of Aeons’ huge dual keels.
Iyapeti scowled, and brushed a straw-colored clump of hair from his eyes. “He’s the most frustrating man alive!” he said, securing the capstan lock on the primary drogue stone cable, above the aft end of the hull pool.
“I know,” said his father. “Satori’s arrogance is legendary.”
A’Nu-Ahki and his son each began to walk forward along either side of the pool mezzanine, inspecting the rows of giant weight stones set in balanced port and starboard outboard steel racks.
Iyapeti did not want his eyes clouded by anger at what his father-in-law was doing to Sutara, especially while checking such important survival gear. He focused on the drogue stones, eyeing the flattened surfaces of the sinkers that would create a drag effect, once suspended into moving water. Stone weights were preferred over metal, because iron or bronze were too heavy for the ship’s tackles to lift.
He looked up at the rail trolley system built into the overhead. If the drogue stones proved insufficient, the mezzanine tractor hoist could also lower a giant tiller oar through the slot-shaped hull pool. The oar would attach to the main capstan by a chain tackle, with a pulley and geared transmission assembly for helm control. The capstan was rotatable by quickfire motor, or oxen yoked around a wheel at the other end of its trans-axle, on the lowest deck. Neither method gave more than a crude helm control system for a ship that size.
“Pahp, do you think there’s anything to what the Ancient once said about us not having enough steerage control for a vessel this size?”
“Probably, under normal circumstances,” A’Nu-Ahki said, while he got up on a ladder and yanked the mobile tractor hoist’s overhead steel rails.
“But these aren’t normal circumstances.”
“And you noticed this when?”
Iyapeti blushed. “Did E’Yahavah say anything against us having better steerage? I mean, he left much of the vessel’s design to us.”
“True. But his instructions ruled out certain items that, if included, would have interfered with things he required. For example, any self-propulsion system would fill the lower deck and bilges with engines, shafts, cauldrons, and fuel tanks. Wind sail is impractical because it would need high rigging that we couldn’t maintain in a storm. The most effective helm mechanisms demand some form of self-propulsion.”
“I’m no sailor, Pahp, and you and U’Sumi have only been to sea twice—well, three times if you count your ferry trip. This is kinda shaking my confidence some—more so as the day nears. Is that bad?”
“It’s understandable, son.” A’Nu-Ahki grunted, as he squatted down to run his fingers around the cable holes in several of the smaller drogue stones, to spot-check for cracks. “But it’s also for the best. Seasoned sailors might rely too much only on past nautical experience, instead of on the voice of E’Yahavah. Conditions will be unlike anything any sailor has ever seen. With us, it’s the opposite—we know just enough to be dangerous on our own. Our lives will depend totally upon E’Yahavah’s direction.”
Iyapeti tried to stifle the panic in his voice. “That’s comforting.”
“Everything looks tight up here. Let’s go down main deck, and see how your brother’s doing with the hatch.”
They went forward through the loft, around vertical exhaust flues that rose through the mezzanine from different deck levels to release the body heat of over twelve thousand animals and eight humans. Even without the ocean waves to pump in fresh air by suction from the hull pool, a breeze through the loft slits, pulled in by rising animal body heat through the chimneys, made breathing inside the ship tolerable. The forward main deck compartments, where the family now lived, had almost no animal odor at all.
Iyapeti and his father descended the ladder aft of the crew quarters, forward of the cargo door, and doubled back to the open bay.
U’Sumi stood outside on a ladder. He eyed the top edge of the opened hatch panel. “I’ve tried to lock the hatch into place,” he said, when he noticed his father and brother. “But there’s a crack in the stoning shell on top of the door. Rain seeped into the inner wood, and made it expand. I’m worried it may not have hardened enough. The crack’s grown all around the edge of the hatch now. We’ll have to plane off the edge stoning to shut it.”
“Not yet,” said their father. “Let’s give it ‘till the seventh day.”
U’Sumi shrugged. “If you say so; but we get rain every day now.”
“I know. Just trust me on this.”
They were helping U’Sumi put away his tools, when a wildly shrieking Khumi drew their attention outside, past the breakwaters.
Khumi ran at them, arms flailing. “Get inside! Shut the hatch!”
Behind him, the gryndel heads rose over the nearest berm in silent rows. The clan matriarch leaped to the top of the stone water-break in one bird-hop, a grinning hobgoblin that seemed to challenge her age-old human enemies to put aside their differences for the present. The other gryndel wurms either sprang up with her, or scrambled around the berm because they were too small for the leap. Iyapeti recognized them as the same clan whose adults had shown up earlier with the elephants, but which disappeared afterward, before the crew could take any aboard.
Khumi raced up the gangplank, squeezed his compact form between them, and tried to heave the door shut past his father and Iyapeti.
A’Nu-Ahki said, “Calm down!”
“Are we really taking two of them?”
“Why shouldn’t we? Look, they’ve brought whelps.”
The mother gryndel and her male consorts came no closer than the top of the berm, but the smaller ones that ran around the break approached right up to the bottom of the plank. They waited there like a curious flock of flightless crocodile-birds with jewel-like scales instead of feathers.
“I knew it!” Khumi said, “Even the demons of Under-world!”
Their father playfully smacked the back of his youngest son’s head. “Stop moaning, and help your brothers pair off a set of whelps for the lower stalls! Whelps, not hatchlings; hatchlings need too much care.”
Iyapeti followed U’Sumi down the ramp, trying to keep down the terror that tunneled up his innards from his groin muscles. They picked their way past several hatchlings, to a cluster of whelps that glared eye-to-eye into ‘Peti’s soul. Glancing back, he saw Khumi stop at the edge of the ramp. The gigantic eye of the gryndel matriarch warned them to choose well.
Iyapeti distantly heard his father clear the tools from the hatchway, and envied his calm. Everyone knew that A’Nu-Ahki had once killed an adult gryndel, with nothing but a hunting knife. Even the titans admired that feat, and had modeled their arena dragon-slaying rituals on the technique, discovered centuries ago
by A’Nu-Ahki only through reluctant necessity.
For Iyapeti, the problem was more complex. Given the weapons, it would not be hard to motivate him to kill these vile-smelling death-stalkers—but to do the opposite? By the time the utter impossibility of his task dawned on him, the whelps were all around them, with nothing to stop them from tearing him and his brother apart, but whatever goodwill existed in a gryndel’s heart.
‘Peti didn’t want to speak, for fear it would startle the wurms into a feeding frenzy. But he didn’t know what else to do. “Father?”
“Not you too! What is it now?”
Iyapeti knew he would never hear the end of it, even before he spoke. “How do you tell a boy gryndel from a girl gryndel? We never trained for the Hunt, like you did.”
A’Nu-Ahki laughed wildly, his solidly packed body bent over. “Didn’t we have this talk before you got married? Look under their tails!”
Iyapeti and U’Sumi crept up behind one of the smaller wurms to check between its legs, under a muscular battering ram of a tail. A rush of modesty overcame the dragon, which swatted them over with a turn of its body. The young monster’s pack mates let out a series of hissing barks that made ‘Peti want to huddle immobile into a fetal ball.
Khumi joined his father’s laughter, which brought the women outside to see about the commotion. A look at the hovering wurm matriarch halted them at the port-way.
A’Nu-Ahki wiped tears from his dark, crinkled face. “Looks like the boys need help again!”
T’Qinna shook her head, and sauntered down the ramp to make sense of the situation. The gryndel whelps instantly obeyed her gestures, as she sang to them an eerie song in her exquisitely accented voice.
Iyapeti wondered at the magic of his sister-in law’s vocal chords, which seemed specially tuned to calm a variety of animals. As soon as the whelps disappeared inside the bay, the remainder of the gryndel clan turned and vanished on the other side of the water breaks.
It took the rest of the day to corral the gryndels, with a few other straggling creatures that made it at the last minute to the ship’s cargo hatch.
Just before dusk, a brief windstorm blew in an assortment of marshland and ocean fowl from the south. The birds landed in exhausted flocks, where the crew had no problem picking them up, some by twos, but the producers of eatable eggs by seven pairs apiece. This completed the complement for the huge second-deck aviaries.
Another looming quiet settled over Akh’Uzan, as the last stalls closed, and the sun began to set in brazen purples. The world took on a deceptive calm, as evening and morning ended the fifth day.
The explosion woke Henumil inside the plush Crossroads Inn, where Tarbet had put him and his party up for the second night since their meeting.
Another blast shook the bed.
Yargat was already up, looking out the window.
Outside, the skies hissed with Lumekkor’s astras, which swooped over unseen enemies on the rolling plains west of the Crossroads. Swarms of black specks appeared in the morning haze above the southwest horizon. The air fleets of Psydonu and At’Lahazh swept over the region, some to engage Uggu’s sky chariots, while others broke through to attack targets inside the fortified astra field and town. Something whistled by and struck the nearby Temple ziggurat with an engulfing inferno.
The door to Henumil’s room burst open. Tarbet and Avarnon-Set motioned them to come.
Avarnon shouted, “Psydonu has the north highway cut off! I’m retreating my flag up to your village. Now is your last chance to escape!”
Henumil paused only long enough to grab the arrest scroll Tarbet had promised him the privilege of serving against A’Nu-Ahki. The others had already raced outside, following Avarnon to his sun chariot.
The sky billowed with smoke and noise, as the earth shook from the impacts of Psydonu’s artillery. Huge craters pockmarked the landscape, smoke-filled cauldrons that the chariot had to swerve to avoid in its mad dash out Farguti’s eastern gate.
Brown mist rose from some of the blast pits, spilling over the ground in creeping rivers. Whenever the gaseous tendrils met a knot of refugees, the people choked and retched until they collapsed in twitching piles. Henumil saw one fellow stagger out of the death mist, and claw his own eyes out to smear them on the chariot’s fortified crystal window.
Burning suburbs littered with dismembered bodies passed by outside, a grim apocalyptic mural illustrating verses from Q’Enukki’s pen. Artillery pounded the rubble around the weaving chariot, splattering its armored skin with debris. Some shells made impact so close that the vehicle jumped clear off the ground, and bounced back down on squealing springs. “We’re only at the valley’s base—not Akh’Uzan proper,” he whispered to himself. “The faithful in the Valley will be preserved!”
Outside the eastern Farguti Crossroads suburb, an exodus of escaping humanity clogged the road to Mount N’Zar.
“They’re blocking the road!” Avarnon-Set yelled, his thick hair bristling like some wild dog’s. “They’d better move, or I’ll run them down!”
Tarbet shouted, “No!”
“There’s another way,” Yargat said, pointing across the field of a burning farmhouse to some foothills northeast of the road. “There’s a trail in the hills. It’s rough, but it’ll be faster than getting behind this mob.”
Avarnon-Set adjusted the chariot’s gears. “Point the way!”
Henumil’s son led them left, onto a path that took them into the lower north hills woodland, around Akh’Uzan’s farmlands, before it deposited them back onto the main road late that afternoon. With the escaping mob left far behind, the Titan resumed his speed to reach the village by nightfall.
The sun chariot shuddered when a savage wind blasted it from out of the west. The sky darkened, as purple clouds rolled in overhead. Rain began to pelt the vehicle, along with furious crosswinds. Avarnon-Set maintained speed, his huge black eyes as fierce as the growing storm outside.
Then they began to slow.
At first, Henumil thought the uphill grade had taxed the strange machine’s engine. Then he heard Avarnon-Set curse, as the chariot rolled to a stop. The Titan leaped out into the storm, but soon re-entered the vehicle.
“Debris hit the acid cells on the power-pack! We’re stuck!”
Henumil said, “Don’t worry, Lord, my town is not far up the road. If the storm stops soon, we can make it on foot by an hour after midnight.”
However, as the clouds sank further in the heavy wind, Henumil began to believe that Psydonu was not the only enemy pursuing them.
This time the weather did not settle until well after sunset, which pushed back Henumil’s estimated arrival time. Instead of walking further, they decided to stop for the night at a farmhouse along the road.
The air quickly grew colder and damper than normal. Henumil had never seen his breath before, and nobody felt like talking. Yet the chill paled against the icy claw in his gut. Not even the cozy hearth in the farmhouse could warm his spirits, as evening and morning finished the sixth day.
By the seventh day, everything had been loaded and battened down aboard ship. Nothing remained outside but rubbish. The family stood in the cargo bay and looked out at the oddly dim, but clear, late morning skies.
Sutara leaned outside the port-way, wistfully scanning past the pan drain toward the west end of the village for any sign of her father. She and ‘Peti had visited Satori again, and had told him of World-end’s final time table. Worry creased her face, as her lips moved in silent pleading to heaven.
She noticed U’Sumi, hovering also by the hatch with his stoning plane. He kept looking at the door, and then back to his father.
The thought hit Suta like a stone. It’s the last day of the world.
“Well, I’m going in to start the mid-day meal,” Na’Amiha said. “All this silence is getting on my nerves.”
Sutara was glad for the distraction. She turned inside the door to follow her mother-in-law, and help with the food.
Th
e noise rocked the entire ship inside its bracings, nearly shaking everyone off their feet. Instant darkness froze Sutara and the others where they stood.
Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.” For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.
—2 Peter 3:3-6 (NASB)
6
Chasm
Q’Enukki trembled as Tiamatu’s first core fragment intersected Earth’s orbit. It arrived before its companion, having passed the red planet Lumekki at a greater distance from it than its partner, which had widened the two bodys’ slightly spreading trajectory, relative to Earth’s direction and position along its orbit. The surrounding asteroid field bombarded the moon’s virgin face, pounding deep into the glassy rock to spill magma blood. The satellite partly shielded its mother world, blocking Earth from many impacts. This first asteroid wave scarred half the moon’s surface in just a few hours.
Then the worst of it hit.
The gravity of the first core fragment grabbed at the moon’s most massive side, which normally faced Earth, and wrenched it out of alignment until some of the formerly earthward-facing lunar surface intercepted the meteor showers. This tug disrupted Earth’s own axial progression, inducing a wobble that threatened to send the planet into gyroscopic chaos.
Q’Enukki hissed. “The moon is ripped away! Earth staggers like a drunkard!”
Samuille said, “Inertia, plus the second fragment, will correct the disruptions. The pass is not close enough to take away the moon. Nor will we leave it in a hyperbolic orbit. The second fragment will approach when Earth’s opposite side is facing it. The mass in your planet’s equatorial bulge will enable gravity and inertia to restore most of the gyroscopic stability.”
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 14
