The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Nu said, “I was afraid of that.”

  “What do we do?”

  “We’ll have to drop one of the auxiliaries, and anchor ourselves with some of the landing weights. Did you see anything else?”

  U’Sumi shrugged. “The good news is that the forward tether is still secure, and its capstan spool, undamaged. Apparently, the first wave broke the lava dam when it drew out, and dropped us cockeyed on the up-ended rim of the dock braces. Fortunately, we weren’t pinned at the hull pool! The waves have brought in a new water level. I think the sea has reached us.”

  Khumi shimmied down the ladder rails and joined them. “The hull pool lid is down and secure. I think we should keep it that way until we release the tethers, and the last bit of land sinks. If your theories hold up, Pahp, once land disappears, the waves will have unlimited fetch, and nothing to crest against. They shouldn’t grow quite so high.”

  “Agreed,” A’Nu-Ahki said. “I should have ordered it shut to begin with. I just didn’t think our first contact with the ocean would be so sudden.”

  The oracle hail warbled. Iyapeti’s voice announced, “Aft tether is unraveled to its full length. Capstan is inoperative under quickfire power, and the transmission shaft to the oxen yoke is bent and needs replacing. The chain release seems intact. Stern depth is stable at forty cubits. Winds remain out of the south. Rains are hard and steady.”

  Nu was just about to relax, until T’Qinna scrambled forward from the ladder-well aft of the living quarters. Wild-eyed and banged-up, she panted, “Oracle out! Frame five—I mean, aft of frame five, lowest deck, starboard—inside the second machinery cargo bay…”

  “What is it?” A’Nu-Ahki asked.

  “We’re taking on water!”

  In a daze, Q’Enukki watched the giant slurries of water-born gravel and silt dismember, and then entomb, plants and animals in vast graveyards. The speed and pressure of these burials, in water solutions saturated by calcium carbonates and silica, ensured that the trapped remains rapidly petrified before natural decay could set in. Most of the land-based animal life that met this fate came from swampy rain-forest interiors.

  The relatively rare human, mammalian, or angiosperm plant imprints in the forming fossil layers mostly washed in from higher altitudes; already dismembered by water-driven gravel-blasting. Nevertheless, a handful of human remains and artifacts lodged in the deeper strata—enough to trouble some of the sages at Time’s End. Clay dolls, tools, metal globes like giant ball bearings or cannon shot, human foot- and shoeprints, along with other mysterious objects of intelligent design, were extremely rare in the lower fossil layers—but they would still be found there.

  On the disintegrating plains of Northern Lumekkor, speeding waves consumed panicked herds of unicorn, and other herbivore quasi-dragons, sweeping them away to deposit them in mass-burial formations. The unicorns, which preferred lower elevations, generally fell before or during the main iridium fallout from Tiamatu’s dust. Of course, fallout came with each meteoric bombardment, and left similar, though smaller, dust signatures each time. Mammals, more acclimatized to the high plateaus, met their end mostly after the main iridium phase ended.

  Nevertheless, both mammals and dragons died the same way—ripped apart by water-driven gravel, and rapidly buried in sediment. The future sages of the dim time would puzzle over these chaotic graveyards of mostly dismembered bones, separated in some places by a layer of iridium in the strata. Other meteoric bombardments would periodically hit Earth for several centuries to come, their impacts often driving super-tsunamis, until Earth cleared its orbital path of Tiamatu’s wildly careening debris.

  A new swarm of asteroids drew Q’Enukki from the echoes of the spoken speculations from Time’s End, as the main body of planetary rubble around Tiamatu’s first core fragment streamed across Earth’s orbit. The lunar surface sustained another round of battle scars, and narrowly avoided destruction from the larger intruders. Positions in space were such that the approaching second fragment worked with Earth’s equatorial bulge to begin to restore the moon to a stable orbit, however.

  Relative speed and angle of approach prevented the asteroids from falling into Earth’s orbit, though many streaked near enough to cause traumatic atmospheric disturbances before slingshotting away. The planet reciprocated by diverting thousands of the giant rocks into erratic new orbits around the sun that would intersect Earth’s path again every so often. The sages at Time’s End would call this celestial swarm the Apollo Asteroid Field. Impacts over the next millennium would whittle the field down even further, until Earth’s orbital path cleared enough to make such events rare.

  Q’Enukki’s relief at the restoration of a stable lunar orbit was short-lived, however. The second core fragment was bigger than the first.

  The crew of Barque of Aeons stood ankle deep in water streaming in from a puncture about a cubit below the waterline. A girder from the drydock assembly outside had snapped, jamming itself partway through the hull. If not for the ship’s kapar-infused mortis and tenon layering, the breach would have been irreparable. Khumi and Iyapeti wedged an extendable vise-brace against the dislodged inner hull plank, and propped the other end onto a vertical ship frame stanchion.

  “What’s our list look like?” A’Nu-Ahki called, who, with U’Sumi, carted in a stoned cedar plank, a drill, some resin caulk, and several spikes.

  T’Qinna answered from outside the compartment, her eyes fixed on two portable level gauges; one clamped to a horizontal brace, crosswise, the other running for-to-aft. “We’re only down three degrees to starboard, and four by the bow. The alligators in the bilges aren’t even breaking a sweat.”

  U’Sumi laughed. “That would be comforting if gators could sweat!”

  She blew a tuft of hair from her face. “Suddenly, he becomes an animal expert.”

  Khumi did not seem so amused. “If you ask me, we were lucky this time! That girder could have sunk us outright!”

  A’Nu-Ahki dropped the plank, and glared at his youngest son. “No second-guessing! This ship will see us in perfect safety to New-world.”

  Khumi kicked the brace into place and wedged the hole shut by tightening the vise crank on its shaft. “I don’t call that hole, ‘perfect safety!’”

  A’Nu-Ahki pulled himself up onto the crate where Khumi stood, and faced him eye to eye. “E’Yahavah commanded this ship be made with sealable compartments. He likely did so because he knew we’d need to use them. A repairable hull breach is a long way from ‘going down.’ Don’t you ever suggest that the Master of this ship has brought us out here simply to toy with us, and then take us under! Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly!”

  A’Nu-Ahki turned to U’Sumi and Iyapeti. “‘Sumi, you finish drilling and driving those spikes. Then you and ‘Peti can cross-brace with the new plank. Khumi, hook up a quickfire motor pump, and start running this stuff out the scuppers. The rest of you, get back to the animal watch schedule.”

  Nestrigati slammed his fist on the podium as if it were the cause of his misery. More of his tiny kingdom crumbled around him each day. Baleful eyes glared at him from every nook of Floodhaven’s heavily bunkered ziggurat meeting hall. The “stormproof” ceiling leaked even through three upper levels, each long since abandoned. Almost every other building had either caved in or fallen into the gorge. Ironically, one of the wind-driven quickfire wheels still worked, spinning madly outside in the typhoon so they could all watch each other starve to death in livid artificial light.

  “So what are we supposed to do, O Seer?” Farguti demanded again.

  “I don’t know, okay!” Nestrigati shouted back. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “No, it’s not okay! I told you not to build only one storehouse!”

  “How was I supposed to know N’Zar’s sacred peak would explode? I felt E’Yahavah leading me to put it in the south sector—nearest what we all thought would be the safest, holiest place! I heard divine wisdom in the decision!” Nestrigati’s bo
dy and mind trembled from lack of nourishment. “It’s not my fault! I never meant for this to happen!”

  Farguti yelled in his face. “So it’s E’Yahavah’s fault we haven’t eaten in three weeks! You and the Divinity have an interesting arrangement! You both meant for us to survive, didn’t you? That was the plan we all paid you our life’s savings for, after all!”

  A grinding noise interrupted them. The metal hatch over the stairwell in the meeting hall’s antechamber slowly slid from its orifice. The tunnel below hooked up with passages from different parts of the settlement. The wooden doors from the antechamber opened. Everybody paused to see whose house had caved in now.

  Nobody expected the wolf-headed thing that stood in the entry, as if lifted from Primal Chaos by the howling winds out of the pit.

  T’Qinna felt the eyes peer up at her from the watery darkness. They lurked in sunken temples and hoary pyramids used in life to propagate an evil that gave birth to madness, but which now brooded silent beneath angry waves and hardening magma. The masses of deluded humanity were dead, but the wraith-things that had raped their minds remained. They glared up at T’Qinna with malevolent hunger—to experience, to absorb!

  Those that still could, swam from their ruined strongholds, and converged around Barque of Aeons like crazed sharks. Others writhed in the compressed heat of their lightless prisons, doomed to blackness more terrible than what awaited even the most wicked of men—dreadful as that was.

  The Fallen Ones—including the few rebel Watchers still able—gathered near the ship. They sought the smallest opportunity to strike upward at the addictive morsel on tethers right above them. That and they hoped to find protection in its shadow. Their appetites gnawed with ageless torment, but the Divine Wind of E’Yahavah, El-N’Lil, had made it so they could not come aboard without some kind of invitation from the people on the ship. It need not be an explicit one.

  The invitation could come in the form of a door left open, an evil wish secretly cherished, or a buried rage left to ferment into a cancerous network of stringy bitterness. The swimming ones knew what to look for, now that they all recognized the truth of their situation. They had ways of cajoling invitations even from those who would never willingly give one if they had been alert, and understood how indirect implications can be just as powerfully suggestive as direct statements; often even more so.

  T’Qinna felt their gaze, and shot up out of bed to warn the others. She started with U’Sumi, who slept all too soundly next to her. She shook him with frantic cries, but he refused to wake up. Then she scrambled across the galley to A’Nu-Ahki and ‘Miha’s quarters. Nor could she rouse them. One by one, she tried each stateroom until she came to Sutara and Iyapeti’s.

  A’Nu-Ahki’s eldest son lay in a death-like trance with wide-open, sightless eyes, alone on his divan. His wife had disappeared.

  The air compressed from T’Qinna’s chest. Somehow, as if looking down through a momentary transparency in the ship’s hull, she saw one of the Lurkers swim upward. She raced from the cabin to search the decks for her missing friend, before the creature could reach the surface. It seemed the ship had sprouted many more than three levels, until the labyrinth of stalls and compartments became endless.

  Like the humans, all the animals slept, with the exception of one pair of bright gold eyes that scanned the gloom in the companionways with cat-like vigilance. Taanyx approached from out of the shadows, ever on watch, defending the humans against creatures of darkness only feline eyes can see.

  “Hurry, Mistress!” cried the Sphinx. “Go to the aft window!”

  T’Qinna bolted for the plank up into the cargo bay, and then up the mezzanine ladder. The loft stretched interminably, as her legs grew sluggish.

  A terrible force impeded her way to the aft conning shack, but T’Qinna fought through by calling on E’Yahavah. She diverted around a sealed hull pool that seemed longer than the ship. The generator between the port and starboard quickfire wind-wheels shot arcs of lightning at her up through the deck, to bar her passage. She shut her eyes, and leapt through the crackling energy, until she finally climbed to the aft window room.

  Sutara sat straddled on the open windowsill with one leg swinging outside, and the other hooked loosely against the inner bulkhead. She seemed drunk, and in the middle of a casual flirtation with someone outside in the storm. A short-necked leviathan, crusted in tumorous clumps of barnacles, swam hungrily in the murky waters below. The creature could swallow her in one gulp if she fell out. Its baleful eyes leered up at her from the foam, bulging with anticipation.

  “Sutara!” T’Qinna shouted, “Don’t talk to it!”

  Iyapeti’s wife turned and glared at her. “T’Qinna, darling, you mustn’t meddle in my affairs. If I have friends outside, it’s my business.”

  T’Qinna tried to protest.

  Sutara threw her other leg over the sill, ready to fall right into Leviathan’s teeth. “If you come any closer, I’ll jump!”

  The ship lurched down by the stern.

  T’Qinnascreamed and woke up in her husband’s arms.

  Moon-chaser had seen the Terrible Ones all around him in the storm—inside the rain, faces in the swirling clouds, shaping every shift in the treacherous mud. They had played with him as a sphinx torments a rat. They took Qia, his new girlfriend, and now there didn’t seem to be any way to get back with Tsuli, with the Archon around. Not that it mattered.

  Though Moon had spoken much of the Helpers, he could not think of one useful thing they had taught him that would help in his current situation. He still hoped to see their shining disks descend over the top of Floodhaven, but for the time being he needed something a little more solid to pin his hopes on. That had kept him close to Avarnon-Set during the long climb, and it had paid off. Too bad about Farsa and the others, though…

  The shelter of Floodhaven’s inner ziggurat chamber opened before him like the gates of a celestial city. Tarbet, Tsulia, and about five others followed Moon-chaser, who went behind Avarnon-Set, into the room. The doors shut out much of the storm’s wail from down the tunnels behind them.

  Avarnon-Set’s voice chilled like the storm. “Who’s in charge here?”

  A man behind an oak podium, who Moon-chaser recognized as the chief Wetter, and an older zaqen glared at each other. They each pointed to the other and shouted simultaneously, “He is!”

  Moon-chaser shrieked with laughter. Nope, I called it right, he realized. These water-heads guessed lucky is all. They don’t even have the brains to see through their own rescue. Wait’ll they get a look at my lights!

  Tarbet said, “We need food and blankets. I’m the Archon.”

  “Of course,” agreed the younger man in a servile tone Moon-chaser guessed would have been absent had Avarnon-Set not brandished a hand-cannon. “I’m Nestrigati, a seer. The elder is Farguti, our ah… other leader.”

  “Food,” Avarnon-Set said, his hand waving his dripping weapon.

  “But good master, all our supplies fell into the crater when Mount N’Zar blew!” Farguti explained with a weak shrug. “It was his fault!” he added, leveling a finger at Nestrigati. “I told him we needed another larder!”

  The would-be seer sputtered for a response that would not come.

  “I don’t care whose fault it was,” said the Titan quietly. “What emergency measures have you taken?”

  Nestrigati hung his head. “None of us know quite what to do.”

  Avarnon-Set shook his head. “You half-wits deserve to starve.”

  Farguti said, “What do you suggest?”

  The Titan’s white-less eyes narrowed in the pallid quickfire pearl light. His icy voice sank to a soft chant that made Moon-chaser’s skin crawl:

  “Some must die so that others may live.”

  Since it should take millions of years for plates of this thickness to melt and be incorporated into the mantle, they should still be there if their sinking occurred during the Flood of Noah only thousands of years ago…. Conventi
onal plate tectonics theory says that even if the plates were somehow able to penetrate the mantle barrier, they would be falling so slowly that they should be incorporated into the mantle long before they would make it to the bottom. This is why the seismic tomography studies in the early 1990s came as a surprise to geophysicists. These studies indicate that there are zones of cooler material reaching from the ocean trenches down to the bottom of the mantle. The evidence suggests that mantle motions occurred through the entire mantle…. It also suggests that there is cold material at the bottom of the mantle, confirming Baumgardner’s predictions and contradicting the expectations of old-age plate tectonics models.

  —Kurt P. Wise Ph.D. (Paleontology)

  Faith, Form, and Time

  10

  Ocean

  The quickfire pearls inside the Floodhaven ziggurat flickered, but did not go out. Tarbet was not sure he really heard what Avarnon-Set had just said. He blocked it from his mind, and focused on other things.

  Despite his exhaustion and hunger, the Archon’s future course was clear. The girl, Tsulia, had unloaded her life story on him while they were still holed-up in the cave. She had gushed about her spying for him, and of her mutagenic husband—another victim of the Temple elixir! At first Tarbet had found her a bit cloying, but as he listened, his outlook had changed. My wife and “Luwinna” must both be dead by now—along with my useless son. I have legal authority to annul marriages. This child is everything I’ve always needed—courageous and willing—for all the right reasons.

  Tarbet pulled Tsulia back into the outer chamber, and quietly closed the doors behind them. When she looked as though she would speak, he held his finger to his lips, and then to hers.